Charles Decker began his lumber business here in 1870. The village was named for him. His son Martin became the first postmaster in 1870. Decker became a station on the Pere Marquette Railroad and the village was incorporated in 1893.

Today, you can visit the Deckerville Historical Museum located one mile north of the village and view local pioneer and Indian history, the railroad depot, John Deere tractors and machinery, a log cabin, windmill, saw mill and barnmural.

The community welcomes you to shop, relax and have fun. The Deckerville pool is open in season and Deckerville holds its annual Homecoming in mid-summer.

From the northern tower of the Mackinac Bridge, the world looks like a photograph taken through a fisheye lens. The water all about is blue and alive; it twinkles and plays and flashes little half-moons of white at you like quick bright smiles. The upper and lower peninsulas of Michigan swell out from either end of the bridge into vast uneven bodies of green. The tower seems to sway, or that may be your unsteady legs. From the cream-colored shoulders of the iron pillar, green cables sweep down and the roadway dangles from them on wires that look like harp strings. It is 55 stories to the water.

The Mackinac Bridge is a member of America's royal family of big bridges. It crosses a five-mile stretch of water. In the center of the span stands a 1.4-mile suspension bridge that is the longest in the world. To students of the art, the Mackinac vies with a small handful of others for the title of the world's loveliest bridge, and it is the only big suspension bridge in North America set in a rural environment, linking Mackinaw City, population 1,000, with St. Ignace, population 2,800.

As big bridges go, the Mackinac carries light traffic: roughly 4.6 million vehicles last year -a volume that the Golden Gate achieves in about two months, and New York's George Washington Bridge reaches every three weeks. But the Mackinac has a different, more important function than simply conveying people: holding Michigan together.

Almost five decades ago, the people who planned and built the Mackinac Bridge had tangible goals in mind: They wanted to ease the flow of people and goods between the two regions; to relieve the isolation of the Upper Peninsula; and to improve commerce and economic opportunity in all of northern Michigan. But they also were driven by the more abstract ideal of unifying socially and culturally a state so strangely divided by geography.

On its 40th anniversary-this month-the bridge has succeeded in some ways more than in others. Some 92 million vehicles have crossed the structure, drawing money to and creating jobs for people who live north of the Straits. Especially in the last decade or so, the bridge has been arguably the most important element in making the U.P. Michigan's fastest-growing tourist region.

But in other ways the impact of the bridge is curiously muted. The population of the Upper Peninsula has hardly changed since the bridge was built, the rugged landscape is barely altered, and the U.P. still has only one 50-mile stretch of divided highway-good things, no doubt, but unexpected ones. More importantly, many residents of the U.P. still perceive themselves as living in a place detached from Michigan, in a not-quite-affiliated appendage of Wisconsin, or, more often, in a world unto itself-in, as they themselves say, the land of the "Yoopers."