Famous Sculptures Placed Around The World Come From Lander's Eagle Bronze

LANDER — Beverly and Monte Paddleford thought they were just doing Beverly’s dad a one- or two-year favor when they started Eagle Bronze Foundry in 1985. 

The couple didn’t know then they were actually beginning a decades-long journey that would take their work not just across America, but around the globe. 

The latest world traveler for the Lander-based business is a life-size bronze cast of Beverly’s “Hope Monument,” which toured Italy last year before being placed in the small town of Loreto in northeastern Italy. The placement was part of the 2025 Jubilee Year of Hope.

Loreto is famous in the Catholic faith as the home of a small stone building traditionally held to be the childhood home of the Virgin Mary, moved from Nazareth in 1291 during the Crusades. 

It landed in its present home in Loreto in 1294 and has been an important shrine for Catholics around the world ever since. 

Legend depicts the Virgin Mary’s childhood home being moved by literal angels at the shrine. Historical texts, meanwhile, mention that the move was accomplished by a noble family with the surname Angeli, which is Italian for angels. 

More than 200 saints and beatified people have been recorded visiting the childhood home of the Virgin Mary in Loreto, including Saint Francis of Assisi. Millions of pilgrims also visit the community every year. 

Those visitors will now also see a monument that was sculpted by an artist from Lander and cast at the Eagle Bronze foundry.

Pope Francis, in a YouTube video posted in June of last year, mentioned efforts to bring Paddleton’s “Hope Monument” sculpture to Italy. 

It was a two-part message that also included the late pope’s thoughts on the importance of hope, embodied in children, to humanity as a whole.

“The ‘Hope Monument,’ by its very presence, is a unique place of hope, tenderness, welcome, comfort, rest for the body, peace for the soul, healing of the mind,” according to a translation of the pope’s words. “For the 2025 Jubilee of Hope, let us bring the Hope Monument to Italy.”

A Healing Sculpture 

Beverly created the Hope Monument 25 years ago, and it has been placed in a number of locations since, including Grand Rapids, Michigan, in early 2000 and the Minnesota Prayer Garden the same year. 

The life-size bronze shows Jesus holding a baby and seated next to the baby’s mother, holding her hand. 

“It started out as a healing sculpture for women with abortion in their past,” Beverly told Cowboy State Daily. “But it quickly became a healing sculpture for people who have lost a child to early death, at any age.”

About 50 “Hope Monuments” have been placed in various locations, Beverly said. The sculpture has also been placed outside the U.S. as well, including Romania and Canada, as well as now Italy. 

“The one in Romania was placed at an orphanage and women’s center in the city of Timisoara,” Beverly said. “And there’s one in Lyn, Ontario, Canada, near Brockville. That’s a 1-acre garden which has a lot of my work.”

Mexico, meanwhile, has a copy of Beverly’s “The Master Teacher” sculpture, which is a 1.25 life-sized bronze of Jesus, seated as he teaches. 

A copy of that sculpture has also been installed at Oral Roberts University, among other places. A photo of the Oral Roberts sculpture shows two students in bronze, sitting at Jesus’ feet. 

Beverly didn’t set out to be a sculptor. It evolved naturally as she was working with art objects at the foundry. 

“We were just working like crazy in the foundry,” Beverly said. “And I just felt like I could do it. I had done a little art in college.”

Her first sculpture was “The Lineman,” which she did for the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., in 1995.

Beverly had been working on an art education degree before moving back home to Lander with her husband and childhood sweetheart, Monte.

They Thought They Were Starting A Church

Monte told Cowboy State Daily he and his wife had originally came home to Lander to start a church.

“Lo and behold, other people had also been sent in here to plant the same church,” he said. “So, it was kind of a group of people who came together to get that going.”

Monte had no real vision for growing the foundry he and his wife had started at the same time, because they hadn’t planned to do that for more than a couple of years.

“Here we are 40 years later,” he said. “And it’s been an interesting journey. We’ve had a chance to be part of some pretty unique projects through the years.”

Those projects have included the Shanghai version of the late Arturo Di Modica’s charging bull, which graces the Bund financial district on mainland China. 

It’s similar to the charging bull that Modica also did for Wall Street, but the tail of the Shanghai bull points up, symbolizing China’s rising influence, and the bull’s head turns right instead of left.

“We had to build a crate about the size of this room,” Beverly recalled. “It was like a little house, and that’s how it got over there.”

Modica did several different sizes of charging bulls over the years, Monte said.

“Those are in private collections and some public collections around this country and in Europe,” Monte said. “So out here in the wild of Wyoming we’ve had the opportunity to do some new and unique things.”

The Most Secretive Industry

In the beginning, though, things were very tough for the young couple.

“There weren’t even any books on the subject (of operating a foundry),” Beverly said. “We hadn’t been to school for it. We had to learn by just my dad telling us what little he knew.”

Monte couldn’t believe how secretive the bronze casting industry was. 

He’d come from industries like photography company Eastman Kodak and aluminum company Alcoa. 

Both required him to sign nondisclosure forms and were so secretive they didn’t even file patents. They didn’t want any of their proprietary ideas out in any public forum.

“It was almost like in Biblical times,” Monte said, referring to the attitude of foundries he sought help from. “It was like it was handed down by word of mouth from generation to generation.”

Monte and his wife have chosen to be much less secretive about their processes. 

They give public tours and share their knowledge with others. Foundries, they said, are disappearing, and they are more worried about losing this artform than keeping it secret.

“It was funny that the stuff I saw in aerospace casting places when I worked for Alcoa would be more technically secretive than anything you would do in an art foundry,” he said. “And that was openly shared with people coming in to talk about it. 

“But for art? It was just silly how people were in this industry, but that’s how it is. So, we learned a lot by trial and error in the early years. We did a lot of right things and made a lot of mistakes too.”

Like the time an employee, trying to replicate a trick he’d seen Monte do, tried to remove an undesirable patina from a statue to put on a different color. He accidentally burned up the entire statue.

“You’d put the bronzes in the furnace at a certain temperature, and it would bake the wax and coating off so we could sandblast it and re-patina it with a new coloration,” Beverly said. “But he put it in the furnace full-blast and melted the pieces. 

“We were kind of hysterical about that at the time, and Monte was not happy with us when he got back.”

70 Steers, No Two Alike

The project that gave them national recognition and proved a turning point for Eagle Bronze was the huge longhorn sculpture they cast for artist Robert Summers, which is in Dallas’ Pioneer Plaza. 

Featuring 70 larger-than-life 6-foot-tall longhorn steers, it’s considered the longest continuous-themed bronze sculpture collection in the United States, according to the Library of Congress. 

Seventy steers, no two alike, are set along a manmade ridge and limestone cliff that includes native landscaping, a flowing stream and a waterfall.

“They landscape it like the Texas countryside,” Beverly said. “When you look at it, you’d never guess that it’s in downtown Dallas. I mean, the Convention Center is just over to the side.”

Installed in 1994, that project not only put the couple’s foundry on the map, it was profitable enough that they could keep the business going.

Since then, they’ve done thousands and thousands of sculptures from all over the world, from miniature to monumental. 

Their works have included golden microphones for the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville on up to a three-times-life-sized outdoor monument of foxeschasing down pheasants for Cabela’s. That one is called “Corn Stalkin’” and was placed in South Dakota in 1999.

The largest monument Eagle Bronze has cast was “The Conquistador,” sculpted by the late John Houser. It’s a 36-foot-tall statue of Don Juan de Onate, who led the Spanish colonization of New Mexico. 

Onate is a polarizing figure, so the statue attracted protestors when it was unveiled. It was installed in El Paso, Texas, in 2006, but eventually moved to the airport.

“What he was trying to do was show the history of that area down in the southwest and the conquistadors were part of it,” Beverly said. “Unfortunately, the day this was installed, there were a whole lot of people protesting and yelling. 

“It was really sad. John was really sad about it. He tried to explain it, but people were yelling too loudly.”

Visit El Paso promotes the sculpture as the largest bronze equestrian statue in the world. 

While there are other larger equestrian sculptures, they’re not made solely of bronze. For example, the 131-foot-tall equestrian statue of Ghengis Kahn in Mongolia is made of stainless steel, and there’s Uruguay’s 59-foot-tall equestrian statue of General Jose Gervasio Artigas. Most of that statue’s height is its granite base, however, and the actual bronze is only 11 feet tall.

Monte still remembers how the artist, discovering that there was a larger bronze equestrian statue in Russia at the time than the one he was working on, came back to the foundry to resize his to ensure it would be the largest.

“As we look back, these are things we’ve taken for granted because we work with it every day,” he said. “When people come in and find an interest in it, that kind of rejuvenates us.”

Thinking about how long some of the bronzes will last is also humbling, Monte added.

“To think that the things we’ve done here will last far, far beyond us — it will last for generations,” he said. “And a lot of this work has been so rewarding in that regard. We get to see how this art touches people’s lives. It makes a difference for some people in terms of how they see the world. 

“So, it’s a journey that I certainly would have thought we would have never, ever been on, but somehow did find ourselves on.” 

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.