Thanhouser Company trademark: a T and C monogram inside an octagonTHANHOUSERCompany Film PreservationBuy DVDs

1915PrincessOne reelDrama

Joe Harkins’ Ward

No copy you can watch online. No print is known to survive. What follows is what does: the release, the cast, the story, and what the trade press said at the time.

The story

“On the death, in the gold fields, of his partner, Ned Lawson, Joe Harkin takes four-year-old Barbara Lawson to live with him. He grows to love the child very dearly. When he strikes it rich he sends Barbara East to be educated, and then, finding his lot intolerably lonely, moves to a city where, being still a young man, he can enjoy life. Barbara returns from school, a beautiful girl of about twenty. Harkin realizes that he loves her, no longer as the child, whom he has brought up, but as the woman he would wish for his sweetheart. He feels that it will be compromising for her to live at his house, so he tries to explain to her the reason why they should part. Barbara wakes to the knowledge that she is in love with her guardian. Her ingenuous ‘But could we not marry?’ solves the situation.”

Summary from Reel Life · 20 March 1915

What the papers said

1 review

“A young mining man, whose partner is killed, falls heir to a girl baby. He adopts her and in later years learns to love her. This plot has been worked out many times, but is handled pleasingly.”

The Moving Picture World · 27 March 1915

Have you seen this film, or a print of it?

Prints of films thought lost still turn up in attics, private collections and archives. A record like this one is how the next one gets found.

Tell us about a print

Cast and crew

Cast
Boyd Marshall as Joe Harkins
Edward N. Hoyt
Helen Badgley as Barbara, his ward, when small
Irene Farrington as Barbara, when grown

Every name opens that person's page, with each film they appear in and which of them you can watch.

Watch instead

Films you can watch from the same company

Matched by cast, director and kind
A frame from The Baby and the Boss14:34
1915 · Same leadThe Baby and the Boss
A frame from A Modern Monte Cristo56:43
1917 · Same leadA Modern Monte Cristo
A frame from Crossed Wires30:58
1915 · Same leadCrossed Wires

More about this film

Bowers’ notes
  1. This film was originally scheduled for release on March 12, 1915, and many trade schedules were published with this date. 2. The apostrophe was misplaced in the title, as Joe Harkin’s Ward, in a schedule published in The New York Dramatic Mirror on March 3, 1915. The Harkin name was used instead of Harkins in several notices, including certain reprinted below.

From Volume II: Filmography of Q. David Bowers’ Thanhouser Films: An Encyclopedia and History, reproduced with permission and unchanged. Read the history of 1915 →

Cite as: Bowers, Q. David. Thanhouser Films: An Encyclopedia and History, “Joe Harkins’ Ward”. thanhouser.org/films/joe-harkins-ward/

Where a print is held

Held by
No print known