History Corner: Light in the Colonial dark: The Magic lantern and Declaration Day

When visitors arrive at the Josiah Smith Tavern for Declaration Day festivities on Sunday, Sept. 13, they will experience a form of entertainment that predates film, photography, and the Tavern itself: the magic lantern show. Its presence among the colonial games and carriage rides isn’t incidental. The magic lantern was already old when the Declaration of Independence was first read aloud in 1776 — and by the time Weston residents gathered to hear it, magic lantern exhibitions were a familiar form of entertainment on both sides of the Atlantic.

The magic lantern is a simple box with a light source and a lens. It dates to the mid-1600s, with the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens among its earliest documented inventors. Painted glass slides supply the images it projects. By the 18th century, magic lanterns had spread across Europe as a popular amusement, carried from town to town by itinerant showmen. In colonial America, they arrived through this same traveling-showman culture, and the tavern, already the era’s social hub, was a fitting place for a lantern show.

“This is the thread that connects the lantern to Declaration Day,” said Artemis Willis, co-chair of Declaration Day festivities.

In 1776, taverns were the places where news of independence often reached ordinary people first — announcements were posted, read aloud and discussed over ale.

“The celebration recovers a genuine piece of 18th-century public culture,” she said. “One that shared the same rooms and often the same evenings as the political life of the town.”

“What makes the lantern worth pausing on is how long it endured,” Willis said.

Rather than being superseded by motion pictures, it remained a feature of moviegoing throughout the silent film era. The magic lantern also continued a separate life as an educational tool well into the 1960s, long after the movies had become their own industry.

Willis grew up in Weston and is a media historian who has organized magic lantern shows at museums and universities and developed original lantern performances of her own. Currently a Research Affiliate at MIT’s Open Documentary Lab, she is also the great-niece of Gertrude Fiske, the Boston Impressionist painter who was founding chairman of Weston’s Historical Committee from its creation in 1931 until her death in 1961. Her co-chair and cousin, Diana Chaplin, is the granddaughter of Brenton H. Dickson III, chair of the town’s Historical Committee and author of “One Town in the American Revolution: Weston, Massachusetts,” among other Weston histories.

The Sept. 13 show will feature Dawn Elliott and Joel Schlemowitz, who perform with original magic lantern glass slides and projectors at museums and cultural institutions throughout the area. Elliott and Schlemowitz will also bring their Raree Show, a hand-crafted, portable peep-show box showing miniature animated stories. Their revolution-themed performances continue the lantern’s living tradition; they are not simply reviving a museum piece.

“The lantern show that audiences will see is a direct descendant of the same apparatus that would have lit up a Weston tavern wall in 1776,” Willis said.”Some forms of storytelling are old enough to have watched history happen more than once, and are still being told.”

Complimentary tickets will be available at the Tavern Stroll, which begins at 1 p.m. at the Golden Ball Tavern and ends at the Josiah Smith Tavern. A reading of the Declaration of Independence at 2 p.m. will be followed by the magic lantern shows at 3 and 3:30 p.m. in the JST ballroom.