Silver City

Walk through almost any American antique store and you will eventually find a piece of Gorham silver: a serving spoon, a butter dish, a wedding gift from nineteen twelve that has outlasted its givers by a hundred years. What you may not know is that virtually all of it was made on the south side of Providence.

Jabez Gorham founded the company in eighteen thirty-one, starting with spoons of coin silver and simple jewelry. When his son John took over in eighteen forty-seven, the operation changed scale entirely. John introduced mechanized production, hired skilled craftsmen from England to train the workforce, and built a manufacturing complex that eventually covered thirty-seven acres with more than thirty buildings. The Chantilly flatware pattern, designed in eighteen ninety-five by William Christmas Codman, became one of the best-selling silverware designs in American history.

By the early twentieth century, Providence was producing more jewelry and silverware than any other city in the United States. By the nineteen sixties, it was being called the jewelry capital of the world, a title that sounds improbable for a northeastern city of two hundred thousand people until you understand that the entire industry had concentrated here over more than a century.

Gorham ran its Providence complex until nineteen eighty-six, when the operation finally closed after one hundred and fifty-five years, when Textron had bought the company in nineteen sixty-seven, and the company changed hands several more times after that. The Chantilly pattern is still in production.