Intern Finds Only Known Surviving Copy of ‘The Heart of Lincoln,’ a Silent Film Thought to Be Lost to History
Released in 1915, the film was directed by Francis Ford, the brother of famed filmmaker John Ford. It had been listed in a record of 7,200 silent films classified as “lost”
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During his internship at a Long Island film archive, Dan Martin made a startling discovery: Curled up in five sealed cans was a 16-millimeter copy of The Heart of Lincoln, a silent film made in 1915. Previously, experts thought it had been lost to history.
Martin found the movie last summer at the Historic Films Archive in Greenport, New York. He’d been sifting through boxes in archive owner Joe Lauro’s office, where long-forgotten films that had been donated to the archive were stored, when a group of five reels caught his attention.
“He came up with a startled look on his face and said, ‘Joe, I really think we’ve got something special here,’” Lauro tells WNBC’s Greg Cergol.
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The 65-minute film was directed by Francis Ford, who also played Lincoln. Ford’s younger brother was the celebrated director John Ford, best known for his Westerns and his Oscar-winning features like The Grapes of Wrath (1940).
The Heart of Lincoln was made in 1915 and recut in 1922, as Lauro tells Newsday’s Tara Smith. But then, like many other silent films from this period, it vanished. According to the Library of Congress, nearly 11,000 American silent feature films were released between 1912 and 1929, but only about 3,300 are known to have survived. The library had previously listed The Heart of Lincoln in a record of 7,200 silent films classified as “lost.”
Many silent movies were printed on unstable nitrate film stock, which is also highly flammable. “It deteriorated, and back then the studios weren’t that concerned with preserving it,” Lauro tells Newsday. “Film was ephemera.”
As Steve Leggett, a program coordinator at the Library of Congress’ National Film Preservation Board, tells Newsday, “They were still learning how to tell stories; people were experimenting.”
The Heart of Lincoln tells the story of Abraham Lincoln and several young Americans during the Civil War, and experts say it’s a valuable artifact of film history. It was created around the war’s 50th anniversary, which was observed in the 1910s. Additionally, Francis and John Ford were particularly interested in the 16th president’s story, as Martin, who studies film preservation at Toronto Metropolitan University, tells Newsday.
“The [Ford] brothers were almost obsessed with Lincoln as this emancipating messiah figure in American history,” he says. “[The Heart of Lincoln] was a missing puzzle piece to the whole myth around these guys.”
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After Martin discovered the reels, film archivist Eliot Kissileff cleaned and digitized the movie. He says it was “just lucky” that the reel’s cans were sealed and undecayed, per WNBC.
Clips of The Heart of Lincoln are now available on the Historic Films Archive’s YouTube channel. Lauro hopes to restore the film and add his own score, and he plans to donate the reels to the Library of Congress.
“It was very rewarding to end my internship on this high note,” Martin tells WNBC. “A film like this provides evidence that film history is still being written.”
