The Kodan Feed Mill Ghost Signs

On a cream-brick gable building near the river, a whole feed store’s worth of painted advertising survives in working order: KODAN FEED STORE across the front, the red-and-white Purina Chows checkerboard climbing the corners, and on another face, White Swan Feeds (dairy, hog, poultry) with a roundel for Chick-R-Mix.

The town’s farm-facing wall

Most of the Walldog Wave’s murals face the harbor side of Algoma’s story: fishing, shipping, the railroad, downtown commerce. This one faces inland. A feed mill is where a lake town meets its farm country, and the brands on these walls are the brands a Kewaunee County farmer would have hauled home by the sack: Purina’s checkerboard, feed-company waterfowl, a chick starter with a hyphenated trade name. Painted brand advertising like this was the rural billboard of its era, which makes this building a small museum of it.

This is one of the two ghost sign restorations in the 2007 set (the Orange Crush wall is the other). Rather than compose a new scene, the Walldogs brought the building’s own advertising layer back up to full strength, lettered the way the original wall dogs would have done it.

Who painted it

The project leading artists were Adam and Sarah May of Lincoln, Illinois, a husband-and-wife Walldog team, and the work was sponsored by Tom Dallman and Cheri Long, one of the few walls in the set sponsored by individuals rather than a business or organization. The Main Street Program’s walking-tour brochure lists it as entry J in the lettered mural key.

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 remember the Kodan feed store in operation, we would genuinely like to hear from you.

Sources

• Historic Algoma Walking Tour, Volume II (Algoma Main Street Program brochure; ed. Leon Raether)
• Letterville sign painters’ forum, Walldog Wave 2007 meet page (contemporaneous photos)
• Algoma Area Chamber of Commerce, Mural Trail Map (July 2025)