1905 Barnsdale's Moving Pictures Stock Poster

This 1905 movie poster features a great stone litho image of a hobo. Walter Barnsdale made this film (and a few others) and toured with an electronic lamp house and a portable gasoline power supply of his own invention to show his films in the towns and cities that he visited. Barnsdale is a forgotten pioneer of movies who, at the turn of the 20th century in Wisconsin, created his own movies and exhibited them at prisons around the country. Not surprisingly, all of Barnsdale's movies were morality plays, designed to uplift the inmates who viewed them. The oldest poster in our collection.