Porter Sculpture Park

Just off Interstate Ninety near Montrose, South Dakota, a sixty-foot bull head made of welded scrap metal rises out of the tall-grass prairie and stares back at passing drivers. It is the centerpiece of Porter Sculpture Park, opened in two thousand by Wayne Porter, a South Dakota rancher and self-taught welder who never took an art class. Porter learned to weld as a child in his father's blacksmith shop and made his first sculpture at age ten.

After graduating from South Dakota State University with degrees in political science and history, he returned to the land, raised sheep, and built sculptures in his spare time. When word spread about his work in Saint Lawrence, he realized he needed more space. The Montrose site gave him room on the prairie for more than sixty works, many assembled from old farm equipment and railroad tie plates.

The bull head alone weighs twenty-five tons, equal in scale to the faces on Mount Rushmore.