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Film Description
The Forgotten Frontier (1931)
Sponsor: Frontier Nursing Service Inc. Director/Producer/Camera: Mary Marvin Breckenridge. Transfer Note: Scanned at 24 frames per second from a 16mm print held by the Library of Congress. Running Time: 46 minutes.
Documentary about the Frontier Nursing Service, founded in 1925 to bring medical and dental care by horseback to Kentucky’s isolated mountain communities. In The Forgotten Frontier, which was shot near Wendover, Kentucky, locals reenact moments when frontier nurses came to their aid. The film shows the nurse assisting in childbirth, inoculating schoolchildren, and transporting a shooting victim to a doctor for emergency surgery.
Note: Selected for the National Film Registry. Mary Marvin Breckenridge was originally employed by the service. Later in 1931, she produced the promotional film She Goes to Vassar. For more information on the Frontier Nursing Service, see “School History,” the Frontier Nursing University, www.frontier.edu/about-frontier/school-history.
Resources
Patricia King Hanson and Alan Gevinson, eds., The American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States: Feature Films, 1931–1940 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), entry F3.1436; Wolfgang Saxon, “Mary Patterson, Philanthropist and Wartime Broadcaster, 97,” New York Times, Dec. 23, 2002, B7.