A fanciful world of giant birds, cosmic machines, and intergalactic lore awaits at this roadside sculpture park.
Just off Highway 12 south of Baraboo, visitors enter a land of absolute fantasy—coils, domes, and a gleaming cylinder, surrounded by a forest of spindly legs and beaks. At the center is the Forevertron, an enormous whimsical masterpiece made of rivets: a 500,000-pound intergalactic and interdimensional time travel machine that, according to its maker, runs on “level 7 love energy.”
The World of Dr. Evermor Sculpture Park is quietly a scrapyard dreamscape and very much a family affair. There’s no slick visitor center, no flashing billboard, no manufactured hype. Yet people arrive from across the country to this other-worldly destination that was nominated for this year’s USA TODAY 10 Best Sculpture Parks.
“People say they can feel the love in the park—before I even tell them it runs on level 7 love energy,” said Tya Kottler, daughter of the park’s creator, the late sculptor Tom Every, who dubbed himself “Dr. Evermor.” “It touches folks deeply. I’m still learning why.”
A Machine for the Heavens
Evermore began the Forevertron in the mid 1980s, completing the core structure around 1985. He had worked for decades in industrial demolition and salvage, with a keen eye for reclaiming and reusing what others would only see as junk.
“He used to say he built it to propel himself back into the heavens on a magnetic lightning force beam, inside a glass ball, inside a copper egg—and Shazam!” Kottler said. “He never really felt like it was finished. Things just fell together, like it was meant to be.”
Some of the scrap used to make the Forevertron are legendary. Pieces of it are reclaimed from the Apollo program, Edison dynamos from the 19th century, 100-year-old glass batteries, parts from at least one power plant, and a gazebo dedicated to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert—a nod to Evermor’s English ancestry. The central “copper egg” holds a glass sphere—the imagined cockpit for the doctor’s cosmic departure.
At the base of the sculpture sits a decontamination chamber—an authentic piece tied to NASA via UW–Madison.
Near the entrance to the park, a towering bug creature sits. “If we run out of level 7 love energy on this planet,” Kottler said, “that’s the backup power supply—the Juicer Bug.”
The Family Behind Dr. Evermor
Dr. Evermor was undoubtedly the vision behind the park, but Lady Eleanor, his wife, provided unwavering support. “She’s been part of it since he first completed the Forevertron,” said Kottler. “It’s because of her dedication that the park still exists.”
“He [Dr. Evermor] was really kind of bored with industrial wrecking,” said Lady Eleanor. “He wanted to do something else and put something together. So, he took his industrial wrecking materials and put it into an art park. And that made him unbelievably happy.”
Over the years, Lady Eleanor has supported the park in several ways. She greets visitors, sells smaller sculptures, runs “paint parties,” and, during Evermor’s health decline, drove him between the nursing home and the worksite so he could keep welding with his right hand after losing use of the left. “She was there every single day,” Kottler said. “She made it possible.”
Kottler, too, has been part of the park’s story since returning to the Madison area in 2008. She launched a website, collaborated on a science fiction drama inspired by her father’s story (a project that reached Warner Bros. and Netflix before COVID shutdowns tabled it), and today she shares daily operations with her mother and sister—everything from greeting the public to running the gift shop. After Evermor passed away in March 2020, the family suffered another devastating loss when Kottler’s younger brother died later that year at age 40. His sculptures also remain a part of the grounds—“little time travelers” and a roster of baseball players he designed as a teenager.
“It was a hard year, and it slowed our momentum,” Kottler said. “But being at the park, seeing people light up—there’s so much joy in that. It keeps us going.”
The Birds That Play Brass
The Forevertron acts as the park’s centerpiece, but visitors can’t miss the surrounding sculptures: phoenixes, arachnids, robots and rocket-age relics, and a crowd-pleaser known as the Bird Band—a group of avian musicians made with actual musical instruments.
“The Bird Band started when my mom found brass instruments at St. Vinny’s,” Kottler said. “My dad got big eyes and went back to buy the rest.” Additional horns came as factory rejects from a maker near Delavan. The birds’ “feathers” are Fiskars blades—garden shears once produced in Sauk City. Evermor bought them by the pallet.
The band even has a conductor. The Director Bird—Dr. Evermor’s only attempt at a portrait sculpture—was modeled after Dan Woolpert, director of Wisconsin’s First Brigade Band, whose Civil War–era performances deeply moved him. For Evermor’s 70th birthday, that band came and performed for him.
In winter, when the park is closed, the wind sometimes “plays” the instruments. “You can hear the different things play,” Kottler said. “It’s eerie and beautiful.”
A Hidden Landmark
Kottler hesitates to call the Forevertron a landmark; she prefers “hidden secret.” Even without broad promotion, the park gets lots of visitors from word of mouth and road trippers.
“The folks who come are the most interesting, delightful people,” Kottler said. “Some just stand there and cry. I wonder sometimes if it’s a connection to fathers or grandfathers who worked with their hands, or to the parts they recognize in the sculptures. There’s a nostalgia to it.”
And when younger visitors arrive—especially those immersed in digital worlds—they sometimes say it feels like stepping into a video game.
But not everyone connects. “Some folks get dragged in and ask, ‘Are we done yet?’” Kottler laughed. “That’s okay. It’s not for everyone. But for the people it touches—wow.”
Looking to the Future
The family has a vision for the park’s future. First, they hope to repurchase the land from neighboring Delaney Surplus Store—longtime friends and “silent heroes,” Kottler said—who currently own the property and have supported the park’s existence for decades. Next, the family plans to implement safety upgrades, better pathways, improved parking, and barriers to the sculptures.
They’re also dreaming bigger: an artist-in-residence program in a building Evermor once drew, a small bistro hub around the “Epicurean,” a fully functional backyard grill sculpture he built for Lady Eleanor in 1976, and an indoor gallery for artifacts from the family home—Evermor’s brass-plated claw machine, among other treasures.
“I wish people could have seen the house we grew up in,” Kottler said. “I want to share that magic: all the things he loved, brought back to life.”
Art education is also in the plans. The park’s annual Forever Fest has invited visitors to build small sculptures from precut parts and then watch welders from Madison College who assemble their pieces—a keepsake and a spark for future artists. As the park grows, the goal is to expand these hands-on workshops and offer regular classes in welding and found-object art.
And for Dr. Evermor, who used to have his shirts embroidered with “Intergalactic Time Traveler,” the future is all relative, anyway.
The entrance to Dr. Evermor’s Forevertron sits just off Highway 12, marked by a large steel sphere and orange gates at S7703 US HWY 12, Town of Sumpter, WI 53591. Parking is along the green space inside the sculpture park entrance (visitors are asked not to park in Delaney’s lot to leave spaces for their customers). The park operates seasonally and weather-permitting—April 2 through the end of November is a safe bet—with hours typically 11–5 on Monday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and 12–5 on Sunday. The park is closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Admission is free, but donations are appreciated. For questions, call 608-381-0465.