Crookham | In the Limelight

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Tabitha Anderson Crookham (1861-1935) and her children, William Crookham (1882-1955) and Ella Crookham (1890-1972), attended a Magic Lantern Show in Utopia in 1896, hosted most likely by Frank Ware and Dolla Shobe, friends of William Crookham, as they were about the same age. Coleman Lesley and Elva Webster lived with Crookhams and worked with Mrs. Crookham on the farm.

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Magic Lantern Shows

Magic Lanterns were a popular form of Victorian entertainment that allowed people to project images on a screen using light creating a slide-show. Some magic lanterns used light form from minerals like limelight to project the screen, creating the phrase “in the limelight”. An article from the Smithsonian Magazine describes how originally magic lantern entertainment was for the upper-classes but as costs were driven down became a middle class entertainment.

An article ran in the Emporia Daily Republican describing how a Magic Lantern works: “By its aid, the lecturer is able to show the most beautiful photographs, magnified to big dimensions, for the benefit of large audiences.” (21 May 1891, page 2)

It is likely that the January Magic Lantern Show was not the only one given by Dolla Shobe as the newspaper ran a bit earlier in Dec 1895 of him taking a stereoscopic exhibition to Yates Center.

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Entertainment

Other bits in the Greenwood County newspapers shows that the Crookhams and Shobe were often entertaining each other as they were part of a Literary Club together.