The Amundson Fish House
Ephraim summer resident Frances E. Moss painted the Amundson Fish House around 1900. The painting is in the permanent collection of the Ephraim Historical Foundation and appears in Picturing the Past: The Ephraim Historical Foundation’s Art Collection (Virginia Jones Maher, 2018).
Amundson’s Fish House stood along Ephraim’s northeast shore. Can you see details in the painting like a drying rack for nets, ladders, and the green boat to the right of the fish house? On the opposite shore (today’s Highway 42) are trees and a few buildings but the impression is there were fewer buildings in the painting than stand there today. Moss created the image twenty or so years after Wisconsin’s “Cutover” - the logging era that removed so many pine, hemolock, and cedar.
Anton Amundson was born in 1855 shortly after his parents immigrated to Ephraim with other Moravians. His angling skills and maritime survival stories were legendary. Door County historian Hjalmar Holand immortalized him and fishing partner Anton Olson in Old Peninsula Days. Holand described one adventure that began at Chambers Island.
The men were pulling lake trout in the winter of 1890. Suddenly, the ice broke up and a large floe carried them northward all through the dark, cold night. They reached Whaleback Shoal, a long jumble of gravel and angled ice slabs southwest of Washington Island. The dolostone reef stretched across part of Green Bay, like a shattered rib. To find out how the men survived dust off your copy of Old Peninsula Days.
Anton Amundson stands center.
His sister Charlotte stands left and his brother Henry right.
In 1924, Ephraim crowned Anton Amundson “The Champion Fisherman.” Amundson, his friends observed, had become captivated over the years with the “finned tribe … If he ever opens his mouth, it is to emit a low and sage remark on the state of the fishing weather.” Amundson’s pals continued, “He has committed assault and battery on more trout, herring, and whitefish than could be loaded into the biggest car ferry on Lake Michigan. He can smell a fish a mile away and when she’s there he spits on his hook and wiggles his line. Fish gather willy-nilly from far and near to be caught.”
The Amundson Farm, early 1900s.
Search the Door County Library’s newspaper archives to read “The Champion Fisherman,” March 28, 1925, page 16, Door County Advocate.
Submitted by Kathleen Harris, EHF Educator in 2020. Revised in 2024 with additional photos.
