By Linda Godfrey and Rick Hendricks of Weird Wisconsin
It blows you away the first time you see it. Is it an immense sprawling machine from the set of a science fiction movie or a vast junkyard fairyland forged by 19th century children raised by robots? Mutant colors run rampant: florescent pink, Kool-Aid lime, meltdown red, radiation-glow green, and Popsicle purple. All delightfully appropriate, for the site sits on the former schoolyard for the families employed at the Badger Army Ammunition Plant during World War II, just across the road. A 10-acre dream in metal five miles south of Baraboo, Wisconsin on Highway 12.
Startling, grandiose, a throwback to the Victorian Machine Age—the Forevertron, the largest scrap-metal sculpture in the world, dwarfs the surrounding wonders. It weighs some 400 tons (and is growing), and measures 120 feet wide, sixty feet deep, and fifty feet high. Its purpose: to propel its creator, Dr. Evermor, into outer space and to provide entertainment and viewing stations for the assembled royalty and masses who will gather for that momentous occasion.
Each separate piece of the mega-installation serves its own function. A wrought iron gazebo is reserved for the Royal Family’s tea while they observe the blastoff of Evermor. There is a telescope for the doubting Thomases, so they can determine for themselves whether Dr. Evermor has made good his escape. The Graviton is a device to “de-water” Dr. Evermor, so that his reduced weight will be easier to translate into space. The Jockey Scale is where he’ll weigh himself before climbing the spiral stairs to the capsule. The Celestial Listening Ears are for attendees to listen to the voices from the heavens. The urn-shaped Overlord Master Control, with a function similar to NASA’s computer system, is for governing the capsule’s gyronic flight, along with its constituent Love Guns, aimed at the butt of anyone not smiling.
The Juicer Bug contains the backup lightning motive force that connects to the Overlord. The Olfactory and Epicurean are for feeding the assembled masses who will watch the good Doctor soar into the Heavens. And atop it all, the copper-strapped egg of glass, the flight capsule, is where the excellent Doctor will sit and be perpetuated into heaven, hurled aloft by a magnetic lightning force beam.
Various attendant gazebos for serving popcorn and other refreshments surround the Forevertron. An orchestra of over four dozen metal birds, bugs, and beasts prepare soul-stirring music for a rousing sendoff.
In science fiction circles, Steampunk, a mixture of Victorian-era science, including steam engines, clockworks, difference engines, utopian romanticism and post-modern sensibility has come into vogue in recent years. But years before novelistic Steampunk, there was Dr. Evermor.
Born in 1938 in Madison, Thomas O. Every got his start in the scrap recycling business. Up until the early 1980s, when he gave away the family business to his son, he had dismantled over 350 factories, power stations, mills, breweries and other large scale manufacturing sites across Illinois and Wisconsin.
Ever wonder why there are few abandoned large-scale industrial buildings in the state? Because whatever components weren’t sent to landfills sit here or in Every’s stashes across southern Wisconsin. Others became part of the Don Q Inn and similar Every-crafted sites. Still others were installed at the House on the Rock, where Every worked seventeen years designing exhibits and honing his craft.
Sometime around 1983, Thomas Every was reborn as Dr. Evermor as he began work on the Forevertron. He was depressed, upset with the world. The judicial system seemed a failure. Fundamental fairness had gone by the wayside. Evermor found himself increasingly dismayed by society’s rush toward a disposable culture and was annoyed with phonies—he just plain wanted to get away from people.
Life needed to be simpler, more meaningful. He turned to welding as therapy. Every re-cast himself as an eccentric professor, turning the clock back to the mid-1800s to his ancestral home in England. There, his story goes, as a young boy he asked his father, a Presbyterian minister, where lightning came from. The old man replied, “From God, my son.” From that day forward, the young boy “dedicated his life to creating a machine that could harness the energy of lightning, and which might eventually propel him into the heavens to meet God.”
Every admits his Evermor persona is a “total figment” adopted at the time by a “man under great duress.” What started as a project out of frustration with the “inhuman treatment society insists on putting us through” changed as Evermor eventually came to view the world with a good bit more humor. He grew philosophical, driven more by artistic inspiration than a need to savage a society he hated.
Today, the Forevertron exists as it might have had it been built with an 1890 mindset, where the forces of electricity and magnetism were misunderstood but fired the imagination. Each assembled part preserves some facet of early technology or machine culture that is rapidly vanishing. Historical materials include 1882 dynamos created by Thomas Edison, early wiring, gears, brass knobs, springs, electrical parts, nameplates and curious mechanisms.
Some newer material has been incorporated, including pieces of an x-ray machine in the Graviton, a Mars hamburger chain sign reborn as the glass space capsule, and old theater speakers from Beloit have been reverse engineered as the Celestial Listening Ears. Most interesting are the decontamination chambers salvaged from the Apollo space mission of the 1970s.
This is exactly what state of the art Rocket Science would look like during that grandiloquent Age of Victoria. The fact that the Forevertron seems that it might work, says Evermor, is more important than whether it actually does. As you stand awe-struck before it, this ostentatious device convinces you by gravity alone that it certainly does work. The ground quivers with imminent liftoff.
“These forms were made in a certain time frame," says Evermor, referring to the machine’s component parts, "and we can pick up the energy of whoever the creator was, whether it be a small blade or something else. That unique form comes along again and is put in that place, so that you always have that energy. That little piece may have a very historical connection to other things and beings of a certain time frame.”
Not only does the machine look like a working device, it’s psychically fused with the spirit and energy of the master craftsmen who created its parts. This energy, along with lightning and a little help from the Juicer Bug, powers the craft.
Evermor always intones “form before function,” and his creation is built on a Victorian aesthetic, with curved arches, circles, and follows the principle of odd numbers—sets of 3, 5, 7 and 9.
“I think some of this stuff kind of evolves. I was an industrial wrecker for a great period of time and we destroyed a lot of things. During that time frame I took it upon myself to pull out interesting shapes and forms that I thought were interesting to me if nobody else. Then I realized that a lot of these shapes and forms are going to disappear from our landscape entirely. It gets working on your psyche, tearing all this stuff down. I wanted to build something up instead.”
Nothing goes to waste: “I’m a firm believer in saving everything.” Recently, he purchased 20,000 aluminum hands for sixty cents a pound, or $1.20 each, from a defunct rubber glove factory. The Moon Maiden, along Highway 12, complete with a giant “key to her heart,” has at its center a door from an Apollo spacecraft.
Evermore doesn’t use blueprints or drawings and has no traditional art school training. “No sketches, no models, no nothing—I just go for it,” he says. “Touch something—it’s for real. Nothing’s phony.”
Evermor’s use of the flotsam and jetsam of discarded culture, the pipes, steeples, glass, machined parts and ratchet-toothed gears continues to inspire people from around the world. Grinning visitors walk away already building their own scrap-metal creations in their heads. Indeed, it’s easy to find Evermor imitators scattered around the country. Lately, as the buzz has increased, folks have held weddings and even funerals on the grounds.
Although age is slowing Evermor’s steps, he has much more work to do. We’re all eagerly awaiting that day when the Forevertron is finally complete, and Evermor de-waters himself, ascends that spiral staircase, cranks the crank to raise the little ball to signal his final readiness, waves to the assembled crowd, crosses the bridge to enter the glass copper-sheathed egg, and pulls the lever to actuate the motive force that will propel him on a high tight beam of electrons out into the cosmos. Long may he ride!
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DR. EVERMOR’S SCULPTURE PARK