You really need to GO to Dr. Evermor's to understand the scale and scope of his work. Pictures just do not do it justice. And while Dr. Evermor is aging and ailing he was busy welding the day we were there. RoadsideAmerican.com says... Dr. Evermor merrily manipulates bits and pieces of the historical slipstream. He's been constructing God knows what behind Delaney's Surplus since 1983.

Dr. Evermor is occasionally known as Tom Every, a scrap artisan who owns a local salvage and dismantling business. He's built the World's Largest Sculpture on a science fiction landscape, from old carburetors and discarded power house machines -- like Star Wars weaponry from the Age of Steam. Oft imitated by "Outside Art"-wannabes, none have seriously challenged the Doctor's ingenious conglomeration.

From the highway, the top of the 320-ton Forevertron is barely visible, its trans-temporal egg chamber poking up above the foliage. A few devices, fanciful Victorian howitzers and strange extrusions, sit along the roadside -- no signs or other warning of what lies beyond. You walk behind the surplus store into a spider-silent alien carnival. Dozens of mechanical creatures, ranging from waist-high to 20+-feet tall, flock in clearings. Disintegration chambers, spaceship gun turrets, and huge insectoid contraptions are obliquely arrayed. There are no labels or explanations, so you'll need to talk to Dr. Evermor himself.

His greatest achievement is the Forevertron, "designed and built in a timeframe of around 1890 ... whereas our dear doctor is a scholarly professor who thought he could perpetuate himself through the heavens on a magnetic lightning force beam inside a glass ball inside a copper egg. You have to understand that at the time electricity and magnetic forces were not fully understood." Tom's anachronistic third person patter is critical to grasping how the Forevertron operates.

"This device is called the Graviton. The doctor would have to stand in that to de-water himself, to get his weight down, before going up that spiral staircase, going across the little bridge, and getting into the glass ball inside the copper egg."

We are treated to a walking tour around the base of the Forevertron. "Everything here correlates to making the trip." Tom waves his cigar towards a gazebo that sits atop a metal tower. "Royalty would sit in the Teahouse for a commanding view. Doubting Thomases look through the telescope to see if the Doctor made it. Two people sit in the Doctor's Celestial Listening Ears over there and listen to voices from the heavens. At night they would measure astrological bearing points, and transfer that information to Overlord Control, which I'm building right over there..."

Tom points out significant items welded into the main contraption. "The Forevertron is built from important historical material, including those dynamos, which were constructed by [Thomas] Edison around 1882 -- they come from the Ford Museum. And this unit was the decontamination chamber from the Apollo space mission. A lot of the rest is from power houses from the 1920s." These days he's excited about a proposal to move his entire complex across the street to the old Badger ammo plant. "We would like to move the Forevertron and other things over to Badger Ordnance and make a permanent memorial to the munitions workers, a repository for art from around the world, and kind of a good-spirited thing for the state of Wisconsin." If he can get through all the government "hootchikoo," it may ensure the Forevertron won't end up on somebody else's scrap heap when Tom "highballs it to heaven."

Do go...

Forevertron

Address:: US 12, North Freedom - Baraboo, WI
Directions:: On U.S. 12, about five miles south of Baraboo, behind Delaney's Surplus, across the highway from the Badger Army Ammunition Plant.
Admission:: Free.
Hours:: M, Th, Fri, Sa 9 am - 5 pm, Su Noon - 5 pm. (Call to verify)
Phone:: 608-219-7830