Tom Every spent decades turning salvaged machinery into Wisconsin’s 300-ton Forevertron; the 50-foot scrap-metal giant still stands at his family’s art park

Somewhere along Highway 12 in Sauk County, Wisconsin, there's a spaceship made from scrap metal in a grove of cottonwood trees. Its copper egg glows above a gathering of metal birds, some of them carrying guitars and trumpets. No one at NASA gave the green light, and no one at a studio bankrolled it, but a retired demolition man decided that the machinery he had been hauling away deserved a second act.

Wisconsin Life, a feature from Wisconsin Public Radio and PBS Wisconsin, profiles artist Tom Every, known to visitors as Dr. Evermor, who turned discarded industrial parts into some of the most unusual art in the Midwest. The story behind the salvage worker turned myth in his own time has some valuable lessons to offer regarding what people discard, and what they may want to keep.

From junk dealer to Dr. Evermor


Tom Every grew up in Brooklyn, Wisconsin, and built a career from taking things apart. He ran a salvage and demolition company, Wisconsin Life notes, and dismantled more than 300 factories, breweries, power plants, and rail cars, work that was itself a commercial trade, though one in which he increasingly began setting aside machinery parts that most crews would have sent straight to the scrapyard. Tom Kupsh, the author of a book on Every, writes in a piece for Wisconsin Public Radio that this instinct for salvage, if not yet for preservation, started early: by the age of 1 4, Every had already filled a railroad car with scrap to sell, a purely commercial habit that would later curdle into something closer to rescue.

The persona came later. A 201 4 Atlas Obscura post explains that Dr. Evermor did not exist until 1983, when the former salvage expert retired and took on the alter ego of a Victorian professor and inventor. He leaned into the costume; Wisconsin Life quotes him admitting he was "the crazy guy."

The machine built to launch a man into the heavens

The centerpiece of his sculpture park is the Forevertron, which, per Wisconsin Life, weighs more than 300 tons and was built in the 1980s with the help of a few friends, using parts from places that once mattered to the state's industry, including a 6,000-pound transformer from a dam powerhouse in Prairie du Sac and a large compressor from a Sheboygan power plant.

The centerpiece of his sculpture park is the Forevertron, which, per Wisconsin Life, weighs more than 300 tons and was built in the 1980s with the help of a few friends, using parts from places that once mattered to the state's industry, including a 6,000-pound transformer from a dam powerhouse in Prairie du Sac and a large compressor from a Sheboygan power plant.

Birds, teahouses and a bit of generosity

Around the spacecraft, the park fills with characters. Tall metal birds with ostrich-like necks, which Every called the "Gawker birds," seem to watch the rocket. Other birds have instruments welded into their bodies, and their metal feathers can be played like chimes. The park also has small structures that Every called teahouses. He envisioned them as workstations, where other metal artists could build their own work, a gesture that the myth had a practical side.

A legacy of reuse

There's a note of critique to keep in mind. Dr. Evermor's project is a testament to waste, built out of the leftovers of industries that moved on. It is also a monument to the idea that nothing is truly finished until someone finds a use for it. He died on March 30, 2020, at the age of 81, Wisconsin Life notes. Whether the Forevertron ever leaves the ground is beside the point; it is already doing what he wanted it to do: make visitors look twice at the stuff everyone else has stopped seeing.