John Ford was born John Feeney in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, in 1879 and grew up in Portland's Gorham's Corner, an Irish neighborhood where his father owned a store. He graduated from Portland High School in 1914 and later moved to California to pursue filmmaking. Ford went on to win four Academy Awards for Best Director and is regarded by film scholars as one of the most influential directors in cinema history.
Eleven of Ford's films have been inducted into the Library of Congress' National Film Registry for their historic and cultural significance, tying him with director Howard Hawks for the most inducted works by a single director in the registry. His work established conventions of the western film genre while also serving as commentary and deconstruction of it. Ford won the Presidential Medal of Freedom and received the first American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award.
For decades after Ford's death in 1973, Portland did not commemorate his connection to the city. Nearly two decades later, philanthropist Linda Noe Laine visited Portland and was surprised to find no tribute to the filmmaker. Laine obtained permission from the city to install a statue honoring Ford.
The John Ford Statue was dedicated in 1998 at Gorham's Corner, the neighborhood where Ford grew up. Sculptor George Kelly created the work, which depicts Ford seated in a director's chair holding a pipe and wearing a wide-brimmed hat. The figure rises from a mound of jagged stones meant to evoke both New England shores and southwestern deserts. Stones surrounding the statue mark each of Ford's four Academy Award-winning films, and the statue is positioned to face the location where his father's store once stood.
The inscription on the statue's base reads: "John Ford - Director - 'I make westerns'."