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2007 · Walldog Wave 2007

The Commercial Fishing & Shipping Mural

Painted
June 21-23, 2007
Artist
Dale Knaak, Sheboygan, Wisconsin (Walldogs)
Series
Walldog Wave 2007
Condition
Extant

A white fishing tug sits at the center of this harbor scene, gulls wheeling overhead, and her name is painted on the bow: MARGARET.

The tug, not the mural

Start with a correction this register exists to make. The Chamber’s old walking-tour web gallery labeled this wall “the Margaret mural,” and the name has drifted around listings ever since as if it were the title. Margaret is the tug. The mural is Commercial Fishing & Shipping, entry H in the Main Street Program’s lettered brochure key, and it honors the working waterfront that built this town before the charter fleet defined it.

Sport fishing is Algoma’s identity today, and one of the 2007 walls says so in letters three feet tall. This wall is its deliberate companion piece: the same water, two generations earlier, when fish were cargo and the harbor moved lumber, produce, and freight to Lake Michigan ports. The 2018 Door County Pulse feature puts it plainly: while sport fishing may be the dominant industry today, the city’s commercial fishing and shipping traditions played a vital role in Algoma’s development. The steel-hulled fish tug, squat and enclosed against Lake Michigan weather, is that history’s signature vessel, and Algoma still has one of Wisconsin’s surviving 1930s fish shanties on the National Register a few blocks away.

Who painted it

The project leading artist was Dale Knaak of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, a Walldog from another Lake Michigan port town that knows its fish tugs. The wall was sponsored by Friends of Algoma.

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. This register documents every wall in the set.

If you painted here in 2007, or have photographs from that week, or if you can tell us about the Margaret herself, we would genuinely like to hear from you.

Sources