Lens into the Past

Lawrenceville’s Stephan Archives debuted a student-made film by Harry Robinson Safford, Class of 1930, at the inaugural New Jersey Archival Film Festival in November at Monmouth University. Safford, a native of Houston, captured snippets of Lawrenceville life on a handheld camera in 1928, creating what has become a visual time capsule of early 20^th-century campus life.

Recently conserved and digitized by George Blood LLC, Safford’s 11-minute film offers a rare lens into the Lawrenceville of a century ago. Against many familiar backdrops, students appear playing baseball, football, golf, and track, interspersed with candid glimpses, lighthearted horseplay and faculty cameos — among them, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and playwright Thornton Wilder, who resigned from Lawrenceville later that year after earning the equivalent of $1.6 million for his 1927 novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and then-Head Master Mather Abbott. Students appear enthusiastic about the novelty of a moving-picture camera trained on them — something their modern counterparts now consider almost de rigueur.

Beyond his filmmaking, Safford was a prolific writer who contributed to the School’s literary magazine and yearbook. After Lawrenceville, he attended Yale University, served as chief intelligence officer at the Red River Ordnance Plant in Texarkana, Texas, during World War II, and later became executive secretary of the Petroleum Equipment Suppliers Association.