Along Highway 12 in Sauk County, just south of Baraboo, sits one of Wisconsin’s most unexpected roadside attractions: a 300-ton sci-fi sculpture built entirely out of industrial scrap metal. Constructed in the 1980s by Tom Every, a former demolition contractor who adopted the Victorian inventor persona “Dr. Evermor,” the park is equal parts outdoor gallery, machine museum, and steampunk fantasy. Here are five fast facts about the monument and the artist who assembled it.

  • It holds the title for the world’s largest scrap metal sculpture. Standing 50 feet high and 120 feet wide, the Forevertron dominates the surrounding Sauk Prairie landscape. The main structure weighs roughly 300 tons and sits at the heart of an open-air park filled with dozens of related salvage creations.
  • It incorporates rare pieces of space, power, and state history. Every did not use ordinary scrap yard junk. He spent years salvaging historically significant machinery, including two 1880s bipolar dynamos built by Thomas Edison, 1920s high-voltage power station components, scrap metal from the nearby Badger Army Ammunition Plant, and the decontamination chamber from the Apollo 11 moon mission spacecraft.
  • The structure was built around a Victorian sci-fi storyline. In Every’s imagination, Dr. Evermor was an eccentric 19th-century professor from England who built the device to propel himself into the heavens on a magnetic lightning force beam. The installation includes a copper-strapped glass space capsule at the apex, an antigravity wheel, a celestial telescope, and a Victorian gazebo reserved for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to observe the launch.
  • The project was an artistic answer to a career in demolition. Tom Every spent nearly three decades running a successful salvage and wrecking business, razing industrial factories, breweries, and old buildings across the Midwest (he also built major exhibit pieces for Alex Jordan at the House on the Rock in Spring Green). In 1983, tired of destroying historical craftsmanship without leaving anything permanent behind, Every handed off his demolition company and devoted the rest of his life to building art out of forgotten machinery.
  • The grounds house a 70-piece metallic orchestra. Beyond the main launching structure, the park contains dozens of smaller sculptures. The most famous ensemble is the “Bird Band,” a collection of roughly 70 metallic birds ranging from knee-high to 20 feet tall. Every crafted them out of salvaged brass instruments, theater speakers, geological survey markers, and industrial springs.

Visiting Info: Dr. Evermor’s Art Park is located at S7703 US-12 in Sumpter, Wisconsin (just outside Prairie du Sac). The grounds are open to the public for self-guided walks right next door to Delaney’s Surplus.