USA: Wisconsin, Sumpter – Dr. Evermor’s Sculpture Park

🔩 A Vision Cast in Steel

Tucked behind a surplus store on Highway 12 in the town of Sumpter, Sauk County, Wisconsin, Dr Evermor’s Sculpture Park is one of the United States’ most remarkable examples of visionary outsider art. The park is the life’s work of Tom Every (1938–2020), a professional demolition expert who spent decades salvaging industrial machinery before channelling his collection into an elaborate creative mythology. Working under the alias of Dr Evermor — a fictional Victorian inventor from Eggington, England — Every constructed a sprawling open-air environment that fuses scrap metal craftsmanship with an intricately imagined narrative world. Far from a conventional gallery experience, the park unfolds across several acres of open Wisconsin landscape, with sculptures at every scale, from objects no larger than a toaster to monumental constructions that tower over visitors. Entry to the park is entirely free, with the site relying on donations from appreciative visitors.

🚀 The Forevertron and Its Companions

The centrepiece of the park is the Forevertron, one of the world’s largest scrap metal sculptures — standing 50 feet high, stretching 120 feet wide, and weighing in at an extraordinary 300 tons. Built from an astonishing array of salvaged components, including Thomas Edison dynamos from the 1880s, high-voltage equipment from 1920s power plants, scrap from the nearby former Badger Army Ammunition Plant, and — most remarkably — the decontamination chamber from NASA’s Apollo 11 spacecraft, it is a monument to imagination as much as engineering. According to the park’s mythology, the Forevertron was designed to launch Dr Evermor into the heavens on a magnetic lightning force beam. A tea house gazebo sits nearby, from which, as Every noted, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert may observe the launch. Surrounding the Forevertron is a rich constellation of companion sculptures: the Celestial Listening Ear, the Overlord Master Control Tower, the Dragon, towering Komodo Dragons, a Juicer Bug, and the spectacularly elaborate Bird Band and Orchestra — nearly 70 birds of varying sizes, each crafted from salvaged industrial parts, all appearing to play their instruments beneath a wild-eyed ten-foot conductor.

🗓️ Planning Your Visit

The sculpture park is open seasonally from 1 April through 23 December, Thursday to Monday, with hours generally running from 11 am to 5 pm (noon on Sundays), though conditions can cause variations. It is closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. The site is accessible and free of charge, welcoming visitors of all ages; leashed dogs are permitted. The paths are flat and gravel-paved, and most visitors find an hour sufficient to explore the grounds fully. A book with photographs of the sculptures is available for purchase on site, and a small range of merchandise is also sold. Access to the park is via Delaney’s Surplus, the adjacent store, which is a curiosity worth exploring in its own right. The park sits approximately 40 miles from Madison and roughly halfway between Chicago and Minneapolis, making it a natural and rewarding stop on a longer road trip through the upper Midwest.

🗿 The Madness of Dr Evermore — or, What Happens When You’re 15 Minutes Early and the Gate is Locked

We very nearly missed it altogether. The entrance to Dr Evermore’s Sculpture Park, just south of Baraboo on Highway 12 in Wisconsin, is marked by a collection of his sculptures right at the roadside — great hulking metal things that demand your attention — so naturally we pulled off to investigate. The sign on the gate was unhelpfully clear: the park opened at noon. It was 11:45am. So there we sat in the car park, just the two of us and one other very sad-looking car, staring at a locked gate like a pair of hopeful Labradors.

A few minutes after noon, some people appeared from along the perimeter fence — a couple who had been exploring the boundary of the property. Karen, who is considerably more suspicious of such things than I am, immediately concluded they’d been having a romp in the undergrowth. As it turned out, they were simply fellow art pilgrims who’d been trying to peer through the fence at the back of the property, where some of the sculptures are just about visible.

They also delivered some rather sobering news: Tom Every — the man behind it all, who worked under the name Dr Evermore — had, they believed, passed away. There were also rumours that the site might be closing. Tom Every was, by any measure, a remarkable character. Born in 1938 in Wisconsin, he spent decades collecting industrial salvage and decommissioned equipment, turning scrap into something genuinely extraordinary. He’d worked for decades as an industrial salvage specialist before deciding that the stuff he was collecting was too magnificent simply to melt down. The result was this park, which he began building in the 1980s on land beside the Forevertron — his masterpiece — in Prairie du Sac, Wisconsin. He died in February 2020, aged 81, and the fate of the park has been uncertain ever since.

We were genuinely sad at the news, in the way you feel sad about someone you’ve never met but whose work you’ve just encountered through a gap in a fence. We decided, in time-honoured British fashion, to press on regardless.

Following our predecessors’ lead, we set off along the perimeter through what can only be described as a Wisconsin jungle — all thistles, brambles, and the sort of low-level aggressive vegetation that seems personally offended by your presence. We thrashed onwards in the manner of people who have absolutely no business being in undergrowth, until we reached the back of the lot. And there, through cracks in the fence — and, for those of us who aren’t entirely short (Karen managed fine; I could simply look over), over the top of it — was something extraordinary.

The centrepiece is the Forevertron itself: a colossal structure some five storeys tall, assembled entirely from salvaged Victorian and Edwardian machinery, including parts from Thomas Edison’s actual laboratory and decommissioned NASA equipment. It weighs somewhere in the region of 300 tonnes and was, at one point, listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s largest scrap metal sculpture. Around it sprawled an orchestra of fantastical metallic creatures — birds, insects, beasts of no identifiable species — and presiding over the whole surreal menagerie was an enormous spider, constructed from old farm equipment and factory parts, genuinely creepy in the best possible way. Karen, peering through the fence with her nose pressed against a rusting slat, remarked that it was absolutely fantastic — this whole secret world just sitting here in rural Wisconsin. I had to agree. It had the atmosphere of something found, not made.

We trudged back through the undergrowth, collected several scratches as souvenirs, and arrived back at the van. At which point we noticed that there were now people — actual, living people — wandering around inside the park. The gate remained locked, but our hopes, which had been limping along at best, suddenly perked up considerably.

And then, bless them, someone opened it.

The entrance is not what you’d call welcoming in any conventional sense. You pass through what amounts to an industrial graveyard: dead radiators stacked in tottering piles, enormous sections of broken machinery, fragments of old vehicles rusting in dignified collapse. It’s as though the park is testing you — making sure you’re actually committed before it lets you in. We pressed on, and then, quite suddenly, it opened up before us.

I am not a man given to theatrical description — you may have noticed — but there is genuinely no other way to put this: it felt like crossing the River Styx and finding yourself, unexpectedly, in Valhalla. The sculptures we had glimpsed through the fence were only the beginning. Everywhere you looked there were fantastical metallic creatures, mechanical aberrations of every conceivable size and shape, all assembled from industrial salvage with a craftsmanship that was, in the truest sense of the word, astonishing.

Tom Every — Dr Evermore — built something genuinely unrepeatable here. And standing in the middle of it, surrounded by his strange and brilliant world, it felt like the very least we could do was to be properly grateful that someone had finally unlocked the gate.

🎭 Meeting the Maestro — Dr Evermor

As we wandered about, we came across an elderly gentleman wearing a large floppy hat, scooting around in a wheelchair with surprising urgency. He beckoned Jack and Emily over and encouraged them to pick up some metal beaters — a bit like outsized drumsticks — and have a go at a row of cylindrical pipes welded along the back of a long, curling length of metal sculpted to resemble the tail of a dragon, complete with scales. The sounds that rang out were clear and surprisingly musical. Tuned, in fact. Someone had put some thought into this, and it wasn’t just bashing metal for the sake of it.

Karen, being Karen, got chatting to him. She has a gift for this sort of thing. She told him how wonderful it all was and asked whether he got to come here often. “Most days,” he said. And then it dawned on us. This was no ordinary visitor. This was the man who had built all of it.

His name was Tom Every — though the art world knew him as Dr Evermor. Born in 1938 in Rock River, Wisconsin, Tom had spent decades working as an industrial salvage contractor, which essentially meant he had legitimate access to mountains of scrap metal, industrial machinery and mechanical oddities that most people would never lay eyes on. Rather than just shifting the stuff on, he began collecting pieces that spoke to him — Victorian-era boilers, NASA equipment, assorted industrial detritus — and started assembling them into something extraordinary on a plot of land just south of Baraboo, Wisconsin, off Highway 12. The Forevertron sculpture park had been quietly growing since the 1980s, mostly unnoticed by the wider world until the Smithsonian and a handful of arts writers started paying attention in the 1990s.

Contrary to various rumours that had apparently been doing the rounds — we hadn’t heard them ourselves, but clearly others had — Tom Every was very much alive. Not entirely well, mind you. He had suffered a stroke, and the wheelchair was a permanent fixture. But his mind? Sharp as a freshly cut steel bracket.

For several minutes we stood there while he told us about his various works. He talked us through the Forevertron — his magnum opus, a colossal structure that once held the Guinness World Record as the largest scrap metal sculpture on earth, standing roughly 50 feet high and 120 feet wide, and weighing in at around 300 tons. He explained, with complete and utterly convincing conviction, that a person could climb up into the glass egg capsule at the very top, be enclosed within a pair of electromagnetic rings, and be beamed — magnetically, cosmically, definitively — to wherever in the universe they wished to go. Jack was absolutely riveted.

Watching Tom tell that story was something rather special. For those few minutes, the wheelchair seemed to simply cease to exist. He sat straighter, his hands moved, his eyes lit up — and he became, in some way that’s difficult to explain without sounding daft, entirely himself again. Like Peter Pan refusing to grow old, or at least refusing to be defined by the fact that his body had decided to slow down without his permission. He was living entirely through his art, and it was a privilege to watch.

After a while, Tom called across his wife — Eleanor, known as Lady Eleanor — who had been hovering nearby with the slightly guarded look of someone who has seen too many people try to make a documentary. She warmed up gradually, and once she did, we ended up talking to the pair of them for something like two hours. Eleanor turned out to be quite a character in her own right, deeply involved in the artistic vision and the running of the place, and clearly the engine behind much of what kept it all going.

We hadn’t planned on spending two hours there. We hadn’t planned on meeting anyone, let alone the man himself. It turned out to be one of those encounters that travel occasionally drops in your lap when you’re not expecting it — the kind you end up talking about for years. Quite remarkable, all things considered.

Planning your visit to the Evermor Sculpture Park

📍 Location

Dr. Evermor’s Sculpture Park is situated directly behind Delaney’s Surplus Sales on US Highway 12, in the Town of Sumpter, Sauk County, Wisconsin.

Address: S7703 US Highway 12, Town of Sumpter, WI 53591

The park is approximately 40 miles north-west of Madison and around 18 minutes south of Wisconsin Dells. It is accessible from Highway 12 going south. There is limited signage, so look for Delaney’s Surplus Sales — the sculpture park entrance is immediately adjacent.

There is no dedicated public transport to the park. Visitors arriving without a car should travel by bus to Baraboo or Wisconsin Dells, then use a local taxi or rideshare service for the final leg of the journey.

🕐 Opening Times

The park is open seasonally from 1st April through to 23rd December each year.

Day	Hours
Monday	11:00 am – 5:00 pm
Tuesday	Closed
Wednesday	Closed
Thursday	11:00 am – 5:00 pm
Friday	11:00 am – 5:00 pm
Saturday	11:00 am – 5:00 pm
Sunday	12:30 pm – 5:00 pm

Hours may vary depending on weather conditions. It is advisable to check the park’s website or contact the park before travelling.

💷 Entry Fees

Admission to Dr. Evermor’s Sculpture Park is entirely free of charge and open to all ages. Leashed dogs are welcome. Donations are warmly encouraged and greatly appreciated, as they help to sustain and preserve the park.

📞 Contact

Telephone: 608-219-7830

Email: worldofdrevermor@gmail.com

Website: worldofdrevermor.com

Postal Address: P.O. Box 103, Prairie du Sac, WI 53578

For enquiries about professional or commercial photography, which is otherwise strictly prohibited within the park, please contact Lady Eleanor Every directly by telephone to obtain written permission.

🥾 Planning Your Visit

Allow roughly one hour to explore the full site, though many visitors find themselves lingering longer amongst the sculptures. The paths through the park are flat and largely gravel-surfaced, which may present some difficulty for wheelchair users or those with limited mobility. Comfortable, sturdy footwear is strongly recommended, particularly after rain, when the ground can become muddy.

Reading about the park’s history and the mythology of Dr. Evermor before your visit will greatly enrich the experience, as there is little on-site signage to explain the sculptures or their context.

The park is suitable for all ages and has a wonderful sense of discovery for children and adults alike. Geocaching enthusiasts will also find a well-regarded cache hidden within the grounds.

The best time to visit Wisconsin

🌸 Spring (March–May)

Spring in Wisconsin is a season of renewal, though it arrives cautiously. March can still feel firmly wintry, with snow lingering well into the month, particularly in the north. By April, temperatures begin to climb into the mid-teens Celsius, wildflowers start to carpet the forest floors, and migratory birds return to the wetlands in spectacular numbers. May is arguably the most pleasant spring month — warm days, cool nights, and the state’s famous lilac season in full bloom.

Door County’s orchards burst into blossom in May, drawing visitors from across the Midwest. The fishing season opens on many of the state’s lakes, and hiking trails in places like Devil’s Lake and the Kettle Moraine become accessible again without winter gear. Waterfalls throughout the north — particularly in Marinette County — run at their most dramatic following snowmelt.

Crowds are modest in spring, prices are lower than summer, and the countryside feels freshly washed. The main caveat is unpredictability: rain is frequent, and a late frost or even a wet snowfall is entirely possible before May.

What to pack: Layering is essential — a waterproof outer jacket, a mid-layer fleece or jumper, and light base layers will cover most conditions. Bring waterproof walking boots, an umbrella or packable rain mac, and a light hat and gloves for early spring. Sunscreen becomes necessary by May.

☀️ Summer (June–August)

Summer is Wisconsin’s peak season, and it earns that status. Long days, warm temperatures typically between 24–30°C, and an abundance of outdoor festivals make June through August the most popular time to visit. The lakes — all 15,000 of them — come alive with swimmers, kayakers, and sailing enthusiasts. The Door Peninsula becomes a destination in its own right, with cherry orchards, harbour towns, and excellent restaurants.

Milwaukee hosts Summerfest in late June and early July, billed as one of the world’s largest music festivals. State parks fill up, particularly those along Lake Michigan and around the Wisconsin Dells, the self-styled “waterpark capital of the world.” The Apostle Islands on Lake Superior are best explored by sea kayak or sailboat in summer, when calm waters and long daylight hours make island-hopping a genuine pleasure.

Humidity can be a factor in July and August, particularly in the south. Thunderstorms are common in the afternoons. Book accommodation well in advance, especially in Door County and around the Dells, where summer demand is intense.

What to pack: Light, breathable clothing — shorts, T-shirts, and a sundress or linen trousers. A light cardigan or layer for evenings, particularly near the lakes. Sturdy sandals or trainers for walking, a sun hat, high-SPF sunscreen, and insect repellent are all essential. Pack a compact waterproof jacket for afternoon storms.

🍂 Autumn (September–November)

Many seasoned travellers regard autumn as Wisconsin’s finest season, and it is not difficult to understand why. The hardwood forests ignite with colour — crimson, amber, burnt orange, and gold — typically peaking in early to mid-October in the north and a week or two later in the south. The Northwoods region around Minocqua, Hayward, and Eagle River is particularly spectacular.

Temperatures are comfortable for outdoor activities: September feels much like a warm summer’s end, while October brings that crisp, invigorating quality that makes hiking and cycling especially enjoyable. Apple orchards and pumpkin farms welcome visitors across the state, and cranberry harvest season in central Wisconsin (the state is one of the country’s largest producers) offers a uniquely photogenic spectacle of flooded red bogs.

Crowds thin noticeably after Labour Day in early September, and prices soften. By November, the colour has faded and cold sets in earnestly, with the first snowfalls often arriving before the month is out in the north.

What to pack: A warm mid-weight jacket or waxed coat, jumpers and long-sleeved shirts, and comfortable walking trousers. Sturdy waterproof boots become important by October. A warm hat, gloves, and scarf are wise additions from mid-October onwards. Layers remain the key strategy as temperature swings between morning and afternoon can be significant.

❄️ Winter (December–February)

Wisconsin winters are serious. Temperatures in the north regularly drop below -15°C, and snowfall is heavy and reliable — particularly in the Lake Superior snowbelt, where lake-effect accumulations can be extraordinary. Rather than discouraging visitors, this creates a destination beloved by winter sports enthusiasts.

The state has world-class cross-country skiing, particularly in the Birkie Trail network near Cable, home of the American Birkebeiner — one of North America’s largest ski marathons — held each February. Downhill ski areas such as Granite Peak near Wausau and Devil’s Head in the Baraboo Hills attract families and weekend skiers. Snowmobiling is immensely popular, and the trail network is extensive and well-maintained.

Ice fishing is a genuine cultural institution: anglers set up portable shelters on frozen lakes and spend entire days pursuing walleye, perch, and crappie. Wisconsin Dells, otherwise a summer resort, reinvents itself as a winter wonderland of indoor waterparks. In Milwaukee and Madison, vibrant restaurant and bar scenes, theatre, and cultural events keep city visitors well entertained regardless of the weather outside.

What to pack: This is the season to invest in proper cold-weather gear. A heavy insulated and waterproof outer coat is non-negotiable, along with thermal base layers, wool or fleece mid-layers, and insulated trousers or snow pants for outdoor activities. Waterproof, insulated boots with good grip are essential. Wool socks, a warm hat that covers the ears, a scarf or neck gaiter, and insulated gloves or mittens complete the kit. Hand and foot warmers are a practical addition for extended time outdoors.

🏆 Overall Best Time to Visit

For most visitors, late June through early October offers the finest all-round experience. Summer brings warmth, festivals, and full access to Wisconsin’s spectacular lakes and outdoor spaces, while early autumn adds the magic of fall colour without the humidity or crowds of peak summer. Those seeking value and solitude will find late May and September particularly rewarding. Winter is an excellent choice specifically for those who embrace cold-weather pursuits — it is a deeply authentic Wisconsin experience. Spring, charming as it is, rewards flexible, patient travellers who do not mind a little unpredictability. Whatever the season, Wisconsin offers a genuinely distinctive and underrated destination that repays the journey handsomely.