Dr. Evermor's Forevertron

Tom Every spent his working life in the demolition and salvage business, tearing down old industrial buildings across the Midwest. Rather than see the most remarkable machinery scrapped, he salvaged it, hauling home decades of boilers, dynamos, gears, and curious industrial relics, some with their own histories in the age of steam and early electricity.

In retirement he transformed that hoard into art, taking on the persona of Dr. Evermor, a fictional Victorian inventor. The character gave the whole project its story and spirit, casting Every as an eccentric genius building a fantastical machine. It was a way of turning a lifetime of salvage and a builder's eye into something wholly imaginative, and it made him one of the Midwest's most beloved outsider artists.

The Forevertron is the centerpiece, a towering assemblage of salvaged machinery that Dr. Evermor imagined as a device to launch himself into the sky. According to the elaborate story he built around it, he would climb inside a glass ball, be electrified, and shoot up into the heavens on a beam of light, escaping the earthly world. The sculpture includes a telescope-topped tower, a decontamination chamber, and other invented apparatus, each with its role in the fantasy.

The look is pure Victorian science fiction, all brass, iron, glass, and gears, as though H.G. Wells had designed a rocket. Some of the salvaged parts carry genuine industrial history within the tangle of the sculpture. Wandering around it, visitors find endless detail, an imaginative logic to the whole strange machine that rewards a slow, curious look.

The Forevertron does not stand alone. Across the grounds, Dr. Evermor built a whole population of scrap-metal creations, most famously a band of oversized birds fashioned from salvaged metal and old musical instruments, their bodies made of horns and pipes. There are dragonflies, insects, and other fanciful figures, a surreal outdoor world that unfolds as you explore.

The sculptures sit behind a surplus and salvage yard, a fitting setting for art made from cast-off machinery. The whole place has an air of discovery, tucked away in the countryside where you might not expect it. For travelers who love the offbeat and the handmade, it is a destination in its own right, a monument to one man's imagination built from the wreckage of the industrial age.

The Forevertron sits in the rolling countryside of Sauk County, near North Freedom, in the same corner of south central Wisconsin as some of the state's best-loved attractions. Nearby North Freedom is home to the Mid-Continent Railway Museum, a preserved railroad line, and the whole area is dense with things to see.

A visit pairs easily with the quartzite bluffs and deep lake of Devils Lake State Park, the circus history of Baraboo, or the water parks and river gorge of Wisconsin Dells a short drive north. Dropping in on Dr. Evermor's strange, towering vision adds an unforgettable, one-of-a-kind stop to a day of exploring this rich and varied region.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.