Gorham Manufacturing Company
In 1842, the Congress enacted a tariff which effectively blocked the importation of silverware from outside the United States, which aided the American silver industry.
In 1852, Gorham toured many of Europe's silver workshops and manufacturers, speaking with individual specialists, including master craftsmen and toolmakers.
He sought highly skilled foreign workmen to train his American workers and hired George Wilkinson, a premier designer and workshop manager, from England.
In 1884, the company opened a store in the Ladies' Mile shopping district in Manhattan, New York City, but moved in 1905 to a Fifth Avenue building which it commissioned from architect Stanford White.
[6] Textron purchased the company in 1967, a move that some critics claim decreased quality due to management's lack of understanding of Gorham's specialty, producing high-quality sterling silverware and holloware.
[16] Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant asked Gorham to commemorate the country's one-hundredth anniversary with a spectacular Century Vase that contained over 2,000 oz (57,000 g) of sterling silver, and in 1899, it produced a grand "loving cup" composed of 70,000 dimes was designed for Admiral George Dewey.
Textron donated a large portion of the service along with other pieces to the Rhode Island School of Design Museum and they are on display in the permanent collection of American decorative arts.
[19] A copy can be found in Providence's Kennedy Plaza, and there are several in nearby Massachusetts towns including Lynn, Wakefield, Haverhill, Taunton and Fall River.
There perforce, our choice must end....Mark the difference, in this one article, between the supine conservatism of the English manufacturers and the alertness and constant progress of the American maker.
Of the flatware patterns designed by F. A. Heller (1839–1904) for Gorham he wrote "we have no idea of the richness of ornamentation of these services, and of the amount of talent expended by him in the engraving of the dies which he has made on the other side of the Atlantic.
[21] The site, located between Mashapaug Pond and Adelaide Avenue in an area called Reservoir Triangle, began operation in 1890 and closed in 1986.
At first, the company utilized the two lower floors with the remainder rented as bachelor apartments, but after a few years Gorham expanded into the rest of the building.
The company left in 1905, and the building was converted by John H. Duncan in 1912 into lofts and offices, removing a corner tower and adding roof dormers.
To promote its new business of statuary, the company cast a sterling silver statue of Christopher Columbus for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
[31] A 1928 book published by the Gorham Company, Famous Small Bronzes – A Representative Exhibit Selected from the Works of Noted Contemporary Sculptors, featured full page photographs of sculptures by such notable sculptors as: Chester Beach, Gutzon Borglum, Allan Clark, Cyrus Dallin, Abastenia St. Leger Eberle, Laura Gardin Fraser, Harriet Frishmuth, Emil Fuchs, Karl Gruppe, Anna Hyatt Huntington, Isidore Konti, R. Tait McKenzie, Edith Parsons, Alexander Phimister Proctor, and Mahonri Young.
[32] The company also cast monumental works for such figures of the American Renaissance as Augustus Saint Gaudens, Daniel Chester French and James Earle Fraser.
