The Austin Flood (Thanhouser, 1911) – Orphan Film Symposium

one-sheet poster for film For Orphans 2020 Online, citizen archivist Ned Thanhouser (founder of the nonprofit Thanhouser Company Film Preservation, Inc.) has created a new introduction to a sobering 10-minute documentary record of a deadly Pennsylvania catastrophe filmed in 1911.

Preserved by the Library of Congress, the 35mm print appears to be a complete copy of the footage the Thanhouser Company released just a week after the disaster. This “graphic picture of the calamity” is presented here with a new piano score by Ben Model, recorded for this Orphan Film Symposium debut.

^{Play full-screen here, or go to vimeo.com/421600208.}

And a lost film.
As Ned has written elsewhere, Pennsylvania-based lecturer and filmmaker Lyman Howe promoted his own topical film, The Austin, Pa. Flood and Fire, among his more popular offerings in 1911. Shot by the recently hired camera crew of H. A. Crowhurst and Charles Bosworth, it is not known to survive. As it happened, the first film that Howe himself made was also of a Pennsylvania flood. In March 1904, he shot two scenes of the flooded streets of his home town of Wilkes-Barre and projected these local views in his traveling shows. (See Charles Musser and Carol Nelson, High-Class Moving Pictures: Lyman H. Howe and the Forgotten Era of Traveling Exhibition, 1880-1920, Princeton University Press, 1991.)

Bibliography
• “Austin Dam.” Wikipedia. Accessed October 29, 2019.
• Heimel, Paul W. 1911 The Austin Flood. Coudersport, PA: Knox Books, 2011.
• Largey, Gale. The Austin Disaster, 1911: A Chronicle of Human Character. DVD. 2007. Directed by Gale Largey. Performed by Willie Nelson, Gerald Ford, & Tom Ridge.
• Thanhouser Co. ad. Moving Picture News. Oct. 7, 1911.

advert 1911 The advertised length of 35mm distribution prints in 1911 matches the length of the preservation negative — 750 feet — created by the Library of Congress from a print in the AFI/Mosch Collection. (A second preservation negative was made from a print in the AFI/ Thomas Souder Collection. Both have been scanned at 2k.)