Forevertron

The Forevertron is one of Wisconsin’s strangest roadside attractions: a 50-foot-tall, roughly 320-ton machine assembled from salvaged industrial machinery and supposedly designed to launch its creator, Victorian inventor Dr. Evermor, into the heavens on a “magnetic lightning force beam.” The enormous sculpture sits at Dr. Evermor’s Sculpture Park along Highway 12 near North Freedom, where its copper-clad glass “space capsule,” towering electrical equipment, pipes, boilers, dynamos, lightning rods, and other industrial remnants create the unmistakable impression of a machine built by a mad scientist with an unlimited junkyard budget. Tom Every, the real-life artist behind Dr. Evermor, began constructing the Forevertron in 1983, transforming the remnants of obsolete factories and machinery into what Wisconsin Historical Society records describe as a monumental work of folk art.

Every was an industrial wrecker before reinventing himself as an outsider artist, and his fascination with machinery began with the things he was paid to destroy. He also worked with Alex Jordan at the House on the Rock during its major expansion, contributing to some of the attraction’s most bizarre mechanical environments. Sources specifically connect Every to the Organ Room and the famous Carousel Room, including the massive carousel with 269 animals and 182 chandeliers. His earlier work for Jordan also included the mobile barbecue he called the Epicurean, a huge copper cooking vessel mounted on wheels. That history makes the Forevertron feel less like an isolated roadside oddity and more like the logical culmination of the same industrial fantasy that helped make the House on the Rock so famously strange.

The Forevertron is surrounded by an equally bizarre collection of sculptures, including enormous mechanical birds, strange creatures, listening devices and other fantastical constructions built from recognizable pieces of industrial history. Among the Forevertron’s components are two Thomas Edison electrical dynamos, high-voltage equipment, material salvaged from the Badger Army Ammunition Plant, and autoclaves associated with NASA’s Apollo program. Every died in 2020, but his fictional alter ego lives on in the machine he built to escape this world.