The Maid of McMillan (1916)
A 1916 silent short credited to co-directors G. D. Bartlett and D. W. Stewart. The surviving print carries no cast list or synopsis, and little else about its production or story has been documented.
The Maid of McMillan survives today largely as a title and a pair of directorial credits — a reminder that most of the thousands of short silent films made in the 1910s left behind no reviews, publicity, or cast records, only the reels themselves, preserved simply because someone chose to save them.
Background
The Maid of McMillan is a 1916 silent short made by students in the Thyrsus Dramatic Club at Washington University in St. Louis, written and directed by George Daniel Bartlett and Donald Wilson Stewart with photography by J. D. Wooster Lambert. It follows Jack Tower, captain of the track team, and Myrtle Maroon, a resident of the McMillan women’s dormitory for which the film is named, through the milestones of campus life: a track meet, graduation, marriage, and a run-in with highwaymen. It premiered in May 1916 at the university’s annual Univee Surkuss celebration, the event now known as Thurtene Carnival, and was added to the National Film Registry in 2025.
What to watch for
The film’s significance rests less on its modest comic plot than on its status as what the Library of Congress has called the oldest known student film, made by undergraduates rather than professional studio hands at a moment when the feature film industry itself was barely two decades old. Its survival is itself notable, since the vast majority of amateur and student filmmaking from this period has not survived at all. The tongue-in-cheek tone the Thyrsus students brought to their campus romance anticipates the collegiate comedies Hollywood would make a decade later, including Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman and Buster Keaton’s College.
