Mel Gould's Buryville

Cheyenne, Wyoming

Mel Gould was born in 1930 and lived at Buryville (or just on top of it) beginning in 1955. A self-taught inventor, Mel filled his property with odd assortment of metal sculptures and strange vehicles, many of which were featured in the pages of magazines such as Mechanix Illustrated in the 1960s. "Mr. Cranky," for example, turned a large carousel that could be seen from nearby Interstate 80, while "Wind Thing," another wind-powered sculpture, generated the electricity for the lights of Buryville.

Buryville was Mel's underground workshop, made of a school bus, camper, grain silo, and 55,000-gallon gas tank that Mel had buried on the property. It was down there that Mel did most of his work, and although he described himself modestly as a "tinkerer" and "pack rat," he had a long career as engineer and worked with environmental artist Christo on three of his Land Art pieces.

Mel died in 2022, but his artwork on the Buryville property remains.