WAUPUN — One year ago the Waupun City Council decided to return the End of the Trail, along with other Waupun sculptures, to the city wayfinding signs and branding.
The decisive meeting was held on Monday, August 8th last year and held a vote after months of deliberation. The City Council had been debating the issue for several months at the time, along with massive community controversy about the statue being removed from the signs in the first place.
Mayor of Waupun Rohn Bishop sent out a press release Tuesday morning celebrating the anniversary of a huge step towards accomplishing one of his primary campaign promises.
“Today is the one-year anniversary of my victory with the council to put our sculptures on the new wayfinding signs. It was one step in my goal of rebranding Waupun as the City of Sculpture,” Mayor Bishop said in the press release.
“First, upon taking office I had the Waupun City flag hung in the council chambers and on city flagpoles throughout Waupun, second, we changed the wayfinding signs to feature the Shaler Sculptures, instead of the leaf logo,” he said. “Now we’re hosting a Centennial Rededication for the Recording Angel, and going forward we’re going to keep building off our City of Sculpture branding.”
Previously the City of Waupun had been using the Economic Development logo for all municipal branding, which is an “abstract representation” of the area’s “natural and human resources.” The logo had been devised in 2017 under the Julie Nickel administration in an effort to rebrand Waupun to be more attractive to potential investors—at the expense of Waupun’s heritage.
It had been controversial among the community but was only used online and in official letterhead, so otherwise invisible to the community at large. In his mayoral campaign against Julie Nickel in April 2020, then-candidate Jay Graff criticized the logo as meaning nothing to the community, remarking that it looked like “corn people,” a moniker which stuck throughout the next few years.
In 2021 the City ordered a set of new wayfinding signs which used the abstract logo, which were received in late 2021. Upon finding out about them, the then-alderman Rohn Bishop—who had declared his intention to run for mayor on the issue of city branding—put a hold on the signs so they would not be put up with the Economic Development logo.
They sat in storage for several months until the summer, when they replaced the old blue wayfinding signs with the new ones. However, upon being placed, the community noticed that they had removed the sculptures from the signs in favor of the abstract logo, leading to the controversy.
Mayor Bishop announced that he would be purchasing decals to cover the logo and reintroduce the End of the Trail to the wayfinding signs, and even include more of the sculptures. The purchase would be made with his own money, along with any donations that members of the community wished to make.
Some people were against covering up the logo for a number of reasons. One camp preferred the abstract logo over the End of the Trail because it marked progress from outdated branding, one of the reasons behind the rebrand in the first place. The most controversial group were a few who spoke at a meeting accusing the City of racism for using an image of a Native American in city branding.
The matter was postponed for a number of meetings due to the controversy, but during the final meeting on August 8th last year, the Council received massive community support for the decals when 18 people spoke at the meeting to express their feelings about the signs.
In the end the Council agreed to having the decals designed and purchased for the wayfinding signs. The new sign decals included silhouettes of four Waupun sculptures—The End of the Trail, The Dawn of Day, The Pioneers, and He Who Sows—along with returning the city’s brand to “City of Sculpture.” The silhouettes were designed by Destination Lake Winnebago Region Visitors Bureau, along with silhouettes of the other sculptures in town given to the City.
The decals were finally placed in early December, and were well received by the community as an improvement over the old designs. The signs number 27 in total and can be seen all across Waupun today.
It is still a question of whether the City will update the official municipal website and other locations from the “abstract” logo to a new version of the End of the Trail emblem.
Correction 8/9/23 12:20PM: — A previous version of this article incorrectly credited Envision Greater Fond du Lac as the creators of the statue silhouettes used on the signs. It was corrected to say they were designed by Destination Lake Winnebago Region Visitors Bureau, a non-profit organization created to promote the region.
