The lumberman who left his name and a sauerkraut factory

Charles Decker showed up in this corner of Sanilac County in 1870 with the standard plan of a Thumb pioneer: cut the trees, run them through a mill, sell the lumber. He built a sawmill and a gristmill, and a settlement gathered around them the way settlements did wherever a mill turned. His son Martin took the first postmaster job that same year, and the place got the obvious name. The Pere Marquette Railroad eventually ran a station through, which sealed it as a real town rather than a clearing.

What makes Deckerville fun is what came after the trees ran out. A lot of lumber towns just emptied when the timber was gone. Deckerville got stubborn and weird instead. Over the years its little factories turned out flax and woolen goods, fired bricks, made cheese — and, best of all, ran a sauerkraut factory, putting up barrels of shredded, salted cabbage from the surrounding farms. It’s the kind of detail that tells you the town simply refused to die when its first reason for existing disappeared, and grabbed whatever the land would grow.

The great fires of 1871 and 1881 swept right through here, the same firestorms that scarred the whole Thumb. They were a disaster, but they did one accidental favor: they burned off the cut-over forest and left behind cleared, ash-fed ground that turned into excellent farmland. So the town the lumber built found its second life in beans and grain and cabbage. The village incorporated in 1893, and the name Charles Decker hung on his sawmill is still the name on the water tower.