The Walldog Wave

Over three days in June 2007, more than one hundred Walldogs came to Algoma, Wisconsin and painted ten murals on historic downtown buildings. The Walldogs are an international guild of mural and sign painters, keepers of the hand-lettering craft, grown out of the Letterheads movement; their first official meet was hosted by Nancy Bennett in Allerton, Iowa in 1993. Algoma got its meet because a Walldog lived here: Dave Petri coordinated the Wave from inside the community, and the Algoma Main Street Program organized it as part of its historic preservation work, with the Wisconsin Main Street organization behind it.

The rules the town set were simple: the murals would honor Algoma's history and the local businesses that existed before 1960 and built the place. The set that resulted included two ghost sign restorations, one panel install, and seven murals painted straight onto brick. Artists traveled from as far as Connecticut. The Walldogs' own material describes about six months of planning and a budget near $48,000; take those figures as the organizers' promotional numbers, which is what the surviving source is.

And the town painted too. Residents housed and fed the visiting painters, and picked up brushes: as one resident put it, "On one Saturday, we had about 65 residents, none of them professionals by any means, all working on one of the murals. Most were there the entire day."

The walls

The Main Street Program's walking-tour brochure (Historic Algoma Walking Tour, Volume II, edited by local historian Leon Raether) is the primary source for the roster: it keys every wall with its project leading artist and sponsor. Each wall has its own page in this register.

Two more Petri-led works belong to the Wave's story but sit outside the brochure's lettered key: the large Native American mural near the waterfront, and "Big Jim," the steam-heritage mural painted on the ground and mounted into place, likely the set's "one panel install." Both have pages in the register; where they fit in the official ten is an open question below.

What the town still has

The 2007 set seeded a mural program that kept growing: the Chamber's 2025 trail map counts twenty-one murals in town today, several of them Yonder's own. Of the original Walldog walls, two are gone. The Ahnapee Brewery mural was saved from a demolition and relocated to the brewery's Suamico taproom, where it still hangs. The Commemorative Fence, the painted panorama Algoma knew as the Senator Stebbins mural, had the set's hardest life: paint on wood. The weather took it year by year until it was past saving, and in August 2020 it was painted over with a new mural. It survives only in photographs, and this register is collecting them.

And the town has kept painting its walls back to strength. In September 2021 Yonder restored the Sport Fishing mural, funded by an unofficial "Friends of" effort spearheaded by outdoor guide and journalist Kevin Naze with money raised from the fishermen themselves. In June 2022 Yonder restored the Algoma Net Company mural, paid for by Algoma's Community Development Committee and the Blazkovec family, who own the building. The Ahnapee & Western Railway wall follows in August 2026. Three of the Walldog walls conserved, each one paid for by the community that wanted it kept.

Open questions

An honest archive says what it does not know. These are the open items, and any of them may be something you can settle:

• The brochure says ten murals were painted in 2007 but letters eleven walls, and notes that more murals were added as the project continued. Which lettered wall, if any, came later?
• Who led the Ahnapee Brewery wall? The brochure says Nancy Bennett; the Greater Green Bay mural guide says Chris Shuster. Both are real Walldogs.
• Where do the Native American mural and Big Jim fit in the official ten?
• No June 2007 newspaper coverage has been recovered: not the Algoma Record-Herald, not the Kewaunee County News, not the Green Bay Press-Gazette. Clippings exist somewhere.
• The condition of every surviving wall, nineteen summers on. We are walking and photographing the set; local eyes beat ours.

Why this record lives here

The Wave's own documentation is disappearing. The Walldogs' website is offline; its event pages survive only in the Internet Archive. The Chamber's old walking-tour pages were deleted in a site rebuild, and their mural photos were never crawled. The Door County Pulse feature that preserved most of the artist attributions no longer serves. The Diaz family's online album of the meet was a Flash gallery, and its photos were never archived at all.

So Yonder keeps this record, and keeps local copies of the at-risk sources behind it. Photographs from the week belong here too: we host them permanently, credited to the people who made them, so they have no chance of getting lost. If you painted in the Wave, sponsored a wall, or stood on the sidewalk with a camera in June 2007, tell us. The twentieth anniversary comes in June 2027, and this record is being built for it. Plymouth brought the Walldogs back for its own tenth anniversary in 2021; the field is open here.

Sources

• Historic Algoma Walking Tour, Volume II — Community Improvement of Algoma / Main Street Program brochure; ed. Leon Raether. The lettered roster with artist and sponsor per wall.
• The Walldogs, past events — thewalldogs.com via Internet Archive (site offline; snapshot June 12, 2022). Event name, dates, scale.
• The Walldogs, Algoma 2007 photo gallery — thewalldogs.com via Internet Archive (snapshot June 28, 2022). Twenty-seven event photographs.
• Steve Grutzmacher, "A Community's Vision: The Murals of Algoma," Door County Living, Aug. 1, 2018 (live page restricted; preserved via Internet Archive snapshot May 15, 2025). Per-wall attributions and community accounts.
• Greater Green Bay Mural Guide — addresses and attributions, including the contested Shuster credit.
• Letterville sign painters' forum, Walldog Wave 2007 meet page — contemporaneous listing with twenty-five period photographs.
• Travel Wisconsin, "Algoma Historic Murals" — syndicates the Main Street brochure text.
• Visit Algoma, Art History Quest and Historic Walking Tour pages — via Internet Archive (deleted in the site rebuild; walking-tour snapshot March 23, 2025).
• Green Bay Press Times — the Ahnapee Brewery mural's relocation to Suamico.
• Plymouth Arts Center, "Return of the Walldogs," Aug. 2021 — the anniversary precedent.
• Algoma Area Chamber of Commerce, Mural Trail Map, July 2025 — the twenty-one-mural present.