The film begins with the following title-card introduction: “Behind three great ranges of mountains lay the pastoral valley of Greenstream. There the Kinemons had long made their home as tenants on the rich farm of John Galt.” There was some variance between credits in the DVD viewed by AFI Catalog and the list of actors in several contemporary reviews. For example, “John Galt” and “Iska Hatburn” were listed in the 10 Dec 1921 Motion Picture News as “Senator Gault” and “Iscah Hatburn.”
       The original adaptation was started by D. W. Griffith and was partially used in the final scenario after Richard Barthelmess, a former Griffith contract player, bought the rights for $7,500. Copyright records list Ralph Yearsley, an Australian actor, as “Ralph Bausfield.”
       The Oct 1921 Picture-Play announced that actor Richard Barthelmess was producing Tol’able David with his own independent company, although he was not listed as a producer in credits. He and director Henry King, a fellow uncredited producer, filmed in “the Virginia mountains” using the same locations as “the ones actually described in [Joseph Hergesheimer’s] story.” The 21 Oct 1921 Motion Picture Magazine described the location as being “in the West Virginia mountains.” However, Henry King, who lived long enough to attend the screenings of Tol’Able David at film festivals in the 1960s and 1970s, often stated that they shot the movie in Crab Bottom, VA, now called Blue Grass, a Potomac River village not far from where he grew up near the Virginia-West Virginia state line. The 30 Jul 1921 Moving Picture World noted that the production used the cabin in which Confederate guerrilla leader John S. Mosby took refuge during the Civil War. Barthelmess told the Jan 1922 Picture-Play: “We were there [in Virginia] for six weeks straight, about forty miles from a railroad, in the locality where Hergesheimer laid the story. Many of the natives had never seen a railroad train, and few of them knew what a motion picture was.” He added that the production hired many locals as extras, including “the mayor, the justice of the peace, the sheriff.”
       Hergesheimer’s original short story did not have a young female character, so either King or scenario writer Edmund Goulding added “Esther Hatburn” to the script “to supply romance,” according to the review in the 10 Dec 1921 Motion Picture News. King hinted to the 9 Jul 1921 Exhibitors Herald that he signed veteran actress Gladys Hulette, who looked much younger than her twenty-five years, to solve “a most difficult problem” of delineating a new character, which required “fine interpretation.”
       The 3 Dec 1921 Motion Picture News noted that Tol’able David was given a screening for Associated First National Pictures franchise holders at New York City’s Hotel Astor on 15 Nov 1921. It premiered in Indianapolis, IN, in early Dec 1921, according to an advertising display in the 10 Dec 1921 Motion Picture News, although the film’s official release date was three weeks earlier, on 21 Nov 1921.
       The film garnered glowing reviews and was one of the year’s most successful box office draws. The 26 Nov 1921 Exhibitors Herald called Tol'able David “a notable photoplay achievement,” and the FD’s Film Year Book 1922-1923 named it one of “The Ten Best” pictures of the year.
       Tol’able David was added to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry in 2007. The film was restored by Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation, with support from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), digitally remastered, and presented “in the visually correct speed of 20 frames per second,” according to Image Entertainment, which released it in 1997.
       Columbia Pictures released a sound adaptation of Tol'able David in 1930, directed by John G. Blystone and starring Richard Cromwell and Noah Beery (see entry).
       According to the Library of Congress American Silent Feature Film Survival Database, this film is extant. Tol'able David was screened at the 2007 Kansas Silent Film Festival in Topeka, KS, on 24 February 2007.