The Gorham Manufacturing Company is one of the largest American manufacturers of sterling and silverplate and a foundry for bronze sculpture.

In the early 1880s Gorham began casting ecclesiastical items, such as lecterns and in 1889 the cast its first statue, The Skirmisher by Frederick Kohlhagen, located at Gettysburg National Military Park.

To promote its new business of statuary, the company cast a sterling silver statue of Christopher Columbus for the 1892 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.  The statue was designed by famed French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, best known for designing the Statue of Liberty.  Since the silver statue was a temporary advertisement, it was melted down after the exhibition.  In 1893 a replica of the statue was cast in bronze and donated to the city of Providence by the Elmwood Association.

In 1896, its casting of W. Granville Hastings bust, Judge Carpenter was the first in America using the lost-wax casting method. The foundry went on to become one of the leading art foundries in the United States.

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. The company also cast monumental works for such luminaries of the American Renaissance as Augustus Saint Gaudens, Daniel Chester French and James Earle Fraser (sculptor).

The Smithsonian archives of American art list Gorham foundry over 700 times in its inventory of American sculpture.