Betzwood: The Movie Studio in the Meadow

On this ground stood one of the most advanced motion picture studios in the world during the silent film era.

Betzwood Motion Picture Studio was founded in nineteen twelve by Siegmund Lubin, one of the earliest pioneers of American cinema. Lubin had been making films since the eighteen nineties and built Betzwood into a three-hundred-fifty-acre production complex with both electric and daylight stages, its own power plant, and a fully equipped processing laboratory. More than one hundred films were produced here.

After Lubin's company collapsed in financial difficulties, Wolf Brothers of Philadelphia took over around nineteen eighteen and operated the studio until nineteen twenty-two before the studio closed for good. Today almost nothing remains, but in its brief heyday Betzwood was considered one of the largest and most technically sophisticated studios anywhere in the world, a fact nearly forgotten in the long shadow cast by Hollywood.