The Ahnapee Brewery Mural

A horse-drawn beer wagon, a bottle of lager taller than the team pulling it, and the flourished word AHNAPEE over it all: this mural celebrated Algoma’s brewery under the town’s original name. It is the one wall from the 2007 set that Algoma no longer has.

The brewery

The Ahnapee Brewery was real. Its 1868 building still stands on Navarino Street and had a long afterlife: warehouse, fly net factory, washing machine factory, feed storage, until Dr. Charles Stiehl restored it in 1967 as a winery. It is Von Stiehl Winery today, run by the Schmiling family since 1981. The brewery itself closed in the 1890s, which makes it exactly the kind of before-1960 Algoma business the Walldog Wave set out to honor. The mural went up not on the brewery building but on the Pizza Bowl at Second and State, entry I in the Main Street Program’s lettered brochure key, sponsored by Jag Outdoor Advertising.

How Algoma lost it

How this wall came to be empty is a story the record tells two ways. A Green Bay Press Times account says the revived Ahnapee Brewing Company’s owner bought the artwork to save it from a demolition, and that it hangs today in the brewery’s Suamico taproom. But the demolition premise doesn’t hold: the Pizza Bowl building never came down, and it stands at Second and State today. The story told in town is blunter — when the brewery left for Suamico, it took the mural with it. We haven’t stood in the Suamico taproom ourselves; if you have, tell us what hangs on that wall.

It is the only wall the original downtown set has lost, and not everyone in Algoma counts the loss as softened. The mural was painted in public, by volunteers, as the town’s memory of the brewery that carried its first name. It ended up thirty miles away, in the hands of a business that kept the Ahnapee name after leaving the town behind. Some residents feel it belonged to the public. This register records the feeling alongside the fact.

The attribution question

Who led this wall is the register’s one genuinely unresolved attribution. The Main Street Program’s own brochure credits Nancy Bennett of Centerville, Iowa, and that name carries weight: Bennett hosted the first official Walldogs meet in Allerton, Iowa in 1993, which makes her as close to a founder as the movement has. The Greater Green Bay mural guide instead credits Chris Shuster, another documented Walldog, who is also sometimes wrongly credited with the Ahnapee & Western Railway mural a few blocks away (an easy mix-up: two murals, both named Ahnapee). Shuster may have painted under Bennett’s project lead, or one source is simply wrong. Until someone who was there settles it, we carry both names and favor the brochure.

The Walldog Wave

Over three days, June 21 to 23, 2007, more than one hundred Walldogs, the international guild of mural and sign painters who keep the old hand-lettering craft alive, painted ten murals on historic downtown Algoma buildings, coordinated by local Walldog Dave Petri. This register documents every wall in the set, including the one that got away.

If you painted here in 2007, know the story of this wall’s crew, or know how this mural left its wall, we would genuinely like to hear from you.

Sources

• Historic Algoma Walking Tour, Volume II (Algoma Main Street Program brochure; ed. Leon Raether)
• Greater Green Bay Mural Guide
• Green Bay Press Times: Ahnapee Brewery mural relocation to Suamico
• The Walldogs, past events: Walldog Wave, Algoma 2007 (via Internet Archive)