The Commemorative Fence

The odd one out in the 2007 set: not a brick wall but a fence at 513 4th Street, painted as a postcard panorama. Inside a painted rope border, big ornate ALGOMA letters ran above the town’s whole story: the Hotel Stebbins, the old factories, a fishing tug at the pier, the red lighthouse. And anchoring the left end, a portrait of a bearded man. That portrait gave the wall the name everyone in town actually used: the Senator Stebbins mural.

Two names, one wall

The Main Street Program’s walking-tour brochure lists this as entry E, the Commemorative Fence. Algoma called it after the man on it. DeWayne Stebbins was an early pioneer and state senator, woven into downtown since 1905, when Captain Charles Fellows’s 1858 Ahnapee House was rebuilt in brick and renamed the Hotel Stebbins in his honor. The hotel he named stood in the painting a few feet from his portrait. This register carries both names so that neither gets lost.

Who painted it

The project leading artist was Mike Meyer of Mazeppa, Minnesota, a name that will make sign painters smile: Meyer is one of the best-known hand letterers in the trade, and in the years since 2007 his lettering workshops have carried the craft to a new generation around the world. The wall was sponsored by WS Packaging Group.

A note on the date. The brochure describes ten murals painted in 2007 but letters eleven walls, and it says more murals were added as the project continued. This fence is the likeliest candidate for a slightly later addition to the set. If you know, tell us.

How Algoma lost it

Paint on a fence lives a harder life than paint on masonry. Wood moves, holds water, and gives the sun something to peel. Year by year the panorama faded, and by 2020 the mural was almost gone: more weather than paint, past any restoring.

What happened next deserves saying plainly, because painting over another artist’s wall is a line we do not cross lightly. Algoma has no shortage of bare brick; nobody needed this wall. It was taken only because there was nothing left to save. In August 2020, Great Lakes Painting prepped the surface and Yonder painted the Sun God over what remained, our first original mural in Algoma, supported by the Community Improvement of Algoma Board. We still miss what was there. This register is partly how we make that right: the wall we could not keep, kept in the record.

It is one of two losses from the original Walldog set, along with the Ahnapee Brewery mural that moved to Suamico. The difference is that the brewery mural still exists. This one survives only in photographs, which is exactly why we want yours.

What the record needs

Photographs of the fence while it stood, from any year, in any condition. We host photographs permanently, credited to the people who made them, so that a mural that could not survive the weather can at least survive in the record. If you have one, tell us.

The Walldog Wave

Over three days in June 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. This register documents every wall in the set.

Sources

• Historic Algoma Walking Tour, Volume II (Algoma Main Street Program brochure; ed. Leon Raether — the lettered key, the fence photograph, and the Hotel Stebbins history)
• Yonder Art Land project records (the August 2020 repaint)
• The Walldogs, past events: Walldog Wave, Algoma 2007 (via Internet Archive)