The Algoma Net Company Mural — Public Art

Ornate Victorian showcard lettering spells ALGOMA NET COMPANY around a green field, and standing in the middle of it, unexplained, is a white horse. The horse is the whole story.

Why there is a horse on a net company’s wall

The Algoma Net Company began by manufacturing fly nets for horses, the mesh blankets that kept working teams sane in a Wisconsin summer. When the automobile put the horse out of work, the company pivoted its netting know-how to sporting and leisure goods, and it kept going for a century: as of the 2018 Door County Pulse feature it was still one of the city’s leading manufacturers, making handcrafted hammocks and hanging chairs. The mural’s white horse is the original customer, standing in for a company that outlived the reason it was founded.

From 1921 to 1980 the company occupied the three-story brick furniture factory built in 1891 at Ahnapee Manufacturing, the building now known as the Netto Palazzo, whose name remembers the nets.

Who painted it

The project leading artist was Michael Clark of Aledo, Illinois, a documented Walldog crew lead, and the wall was sponsored by Baylake Bank. The Main Street Program’s walking-tour brochure lists it as entry F in the lettered mural key.

Stewardship

Yonder restored this mural in June 2022, paid for by Algoma’s Community Development Committee and by the Blazkovec family, who own the building the mural is painted on. A wall that honors a company for outliving its founding purpose deserved the same treatment, and got it.

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. The event was conceived through the Algoma Main Street Program’s preservation work and coordinated by local Walldog Dave Petri. The murals honor Algoma businesses and history from before 1960; this one honors a business that bridged both sides of that line. This register documents every wall in the set.

If you painted here in 2007, or have photographs from that week, we would genuinely like to hear from you.

Sources

Historic Algoma Walking Tour, Volume II (Algoma Main Street Program brochure; ed. Leon Raether)
Door County Pulse: A Community’s Vision, the Murals of Algoma (2018)
The Walldogs, past events: Walldog Wave, Algoma 2007 (via Internet Archive)