About the Collection
In April 1993, the Southwest Film-Video Archive (now the G. William Jones Film and Video Collection) at SMU was contacted by a private individual in the small east Texas town of Sulphur Springs regarding some old films that had been moldering in a closet for fifteen years.
The reels of film on original 35 mm nitrate stock were acquired, cleaned, and inspected. Eight reels contained a total of 33 early films predating the Nickelodeon era. Remarkably, the surviving films are substantially intact and relatively free of nitrate decomposition.
The collection, which spans 1898 through 1906, includes a number of single-shot actualities, vaudeville acts, and comedies, five multi-shot story films of the 1904-05 period, and seven films taken by Edison cameramen of the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Twenty-nine films from the Sulphur Springs collection are available online.
