The Forgotten Frontier
"Mary Breckinridge founded the Frontier Nursing Service in 1925 as a project to demonstrate the delivery of accessible and affordable health care in a rural population of Kentucky. Breckinridge's cousin, Mary Marvin Breckinridge, was an accomplished photographer and used her artistic talents to aid her cousin's mission. Beginning in 1928, Mary Marvin traversed the Appalachian back roads of Eastern Kentucky to produce a documentary showing nurse-midwives as they race on horseback through the wooded hills to deliver babies, treat gunshot victims and inoculate schoolchildren."
— The Library of Congress
The Forgotten Frontier
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This film has been preserved in the National Film Registry in 1996.
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The Forgotten Frontier is a 1931 American documentary film about the Frontier Nursing Service, nurses on horseback, who traveled the back roads of the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky. It was directed by Mary Marvin Breckinridge, and featured her cousin, Mary Breckinridge, who was a nurse-midwife and founded the Frontier Nursing Service. Also featured are the people of Leslie County, Kentucky, many of whom reenacted their stories.
The film was shot with a hand-cranked camera, often in extreme climate. Stills created during the film's production are available at the Library of Congress.
Why It Rocks
- Mary Breckinridge founded the Frontier Nursing Service in 1925, which would later operate a hospital in Hyden and nine outlying clinics. During one of her tours of urban areas on a fund-raising drive, she suggested that Mary Marvin could study cinematography and make a film about the Frontier Nursing Service. Mary Marvin traveled to Kentucky in 1928, spending the summer as a volunteer courier for the Frontier Nursing Service. She made three trips in all, covering some six hundred miles on horseback, interviewing families and nurses, and filming in the winter, spring, and summer. Mary Marvin was responsible for transporting her equipment (which included a hand-cranked 35mm camera), setting up and composing her shots, lighting and exposing her scenes, and directing a cast of non-actors who were re-enacting accidents, emergency calls, inoculation drives, and childbirths.
- Considering location difficulties, any usable footage at all would have been an achievement, and yet despite all of the setbacks, the film stands up to any nonfiction film of its period. Mary Marvin displays a full grasp of cinematic technique and an understanding of film form. Apart from the story it tells, which has its own fascinations, the documentary is a beautiful, exciting work of carefully edited sequences, stunning landscapes, and a directorial style that brings viewers directly into the action.
- The film shows just how difficult it was to travel from hamlet to city, but Mary Marvin also captures the beauty of the countryside, the thrill of crossing a river on horseback, the force of weather.
- The Frontier Nursing Service’s various clinics are documented, as is Mrs. Mary Breckinridge’s estate and the recently completed Hyden Hospital. The film highlights the impact of earlier benefactors while reaching out to new donors, an astute strategy when appealing for donations.
- The film's broken into segments, first following nurses on their rounds; showing a campaign to inoculate students at a school; focusing on a farmer bringing his ailing twins to a doctor in the city; and finally re-enacting the rescue of a gunshot victim.
- The Frontier Nursing Service, which still operates, had a direct impact on the health and well-being of the people of eastern Kentucky. Its public health statistics from 1925 to 1954 bettered the country as a whole. For example, in its area of coverage, the Service achieved a maternal mortality rate of 9.1 per 10,000 births, as opposed to 34 per 10,000 for the entire United States.