"This mural is located in Whitehall, but it represents all of us."
A Whitehall resident said that at a community meeting in May 2025, and it did more to shape the wall behind the CatchMark Technologies building than any single afternoon with a paintbrush. By the time Frankenmuth artist Stephen Hargash finished the piece in the spring of 2026, its official name wasn't Whitehall Wonders. It's White Lake Wonders. That shift from a town name to a lake name is worth understanding if you spend any time downtown, because it tells you something about how this place sees itself that a plaque never will.
The mural sits in the Colby Street Pocket Park, painted directly onto the CatchMark Technologies building wall: 12 feet tall, 120 feet long, 1,440 square feet of seasons, shoreline, and wildlife. As of a June 2026 report, the wall was finished and a dedication ceremony was still being worked out, with no date announced. But the finished wall isn't really the interesting part. The interesting part is how long it took to get there, and what changed along the way.
Six Years From Idea to Grant Money
The mural started as a single person's reaction to a road trip. Erin Peyer, director of the Arts Council of White Lake–Nuveen Center, visited Jackson, Michigan, a town known for the murals scattered across its downtown, and came home with a simple thought: she wanted something like that here. That was around 2020. The idea then sat for years, not because nobody cared, but because nobody had the money.
The City of Whitehall was the first to commit financially, followed by an anonymous donor. From there, ACWL-Nuveen spent years writing grant applications before two came through in late 2024: $1,500 from the Great Lakes Energy People Fund and $5,000 from the White Lake Community Fund of the Community Foundation for Muskegon County. A selection committee that included Mayor Steve Salter, Brent Raeth of CatchMark Technologies, and Beth Pierson of the White Lake Community Fund narrowed a pool of more than 40 applicants down to a shortlist, with finalists submitting design drafts by a mid-January deadline.
If you've ever wondered why a small downtown improvement takes years to show up, this is the honest answer. It isn't red tape. It's a scatter of small grants that each take their own timeline to land, stacked one on top of another until the total finally covers a wall.
Forty Applicants, One Name From Frankenmuth
The committee picked Hargash, a muralist based in Frankenmuth who has been doing large-scale public work in Michigan and New York for roughly 30 years. Before he sketched anything, he did what a lot of visiting artists skip: he came here first. He walked Whitehall and Montague, spent time along the shoreline, looked into the area's wildlife and history, and reviewed community surveys that asked residents to name the words, colors, events, and landmarks that define the White Lake area to them.
He also thought through something more practical: how people would actually encounter the piece. It sits in an alley setting, the kind of space people move through rather than stand and study. Hargash designed with that in mind, describing the goal as making the mural read like music moving from one image to the next as a pedestrian walks past, rather than a single scene meant to be viewed head-on. "I always think about how people are going to come in and see it," he said. It's a small detail, but it explains why the finished wall feels more like a walk than a photograph.
The Meeting That Rewrote the Map
The design wasn't finalized in a studio. On May 1, 2025, Hargash presented his preliminary draft to the community at the ACWL-Nuveen Center, and one section drew more feedback than anything else: a map of Michigan with Whitehall highlighted on it.
Residents pushed back, and not on the artwork itself. The objection was about the label. Whitehall and Montague sit on opposite sides of White Lake, connected by water and by a shared identity that neither town claims alone. A mural painted on a Whitehall wall but funded in part by White Lake–wide organizations, meant to represent the area both towns share, felt wrong if it only named one of them. The room's preference was clear: call it White Lake, not Whitehall.
Hargash took the note seriously, and it shows in the final result. The piece that exists today carries the White Lake Wonders name, not a Whitehall-branded one. That's not a small thing for a public art project that a lot of hands and years of grant writing went into. It means the room won the argument it started.
What Ended Up on the Wall
The finished mural, painted through the summer of 2025 with finishing touches added in the spring of 2026 by Hargash and his assistant, Billy Budd, includes:
- A panorama moving through the four seasons
- Depictions of the channel that links White Lake to Lake Michigan
- Bird migrations tied to the shoreline
- Native flora and fauna specific to the area
- Local landmarks residents flagged in early community surveys
- Sweeping sky transitions meant to carry the eye down the length of the wall
None of it is abstract for the sake of being abstract. Every element traces back to something a resident named in a survey or said out loud at a meeting, which is probably why the piece reads less like decoration and more like a long answer to the question "what does this place actually look like to the people who live here."
Named, Painted, Still Waiting on a Ribbon
As of the most recent local report this June, the wall itself is done. What isn't done yet is the formal send-off. A dedication ceremony has been described as in the works, but no date has been set publicly. That gap between finished and formally unveiled is fairly normal for a project funded by a patchwork of small grants and donors, since scheduling a ceremony means coordinating with the City, the Arts Council, and everyone who contributed along the way, from Great Lakes Energy to Bells Furniture to the family and friends who gave in memory of Janet Nedeau.
If you want to see it before the ribbon cutting, it's not hard to find. Walk to the Colby Street Pocket Park downtown, look for the CatchMark Technologies building, and you'll see 120 feet of it running the length of the alley wall. Go slow. The mural was built to be walked past, not stood in front of, so the best way to see it is the way Hargash designed it to be seen: one section at a time, on foot, on your way to somewhere else.
That's the kind of detail that only shows up if you're paying attention to a place beyond its listing photos. It's also, honestly, the kind of thing we like paying attention to. If you're curious about what else is changing in downtown Whitehall, or you're thinking further down the road about property here, the team at Dylan Zuniga is happy to talk through it. Schedule a no-pressure conversation whenever you're ready.
