Picture This

Remember, there was a time before moving pictures.

It was an age not just before Harry Potter's fantastic animated photos became reality on smartphones but before the movies existed to entertain families on a Friday evening.

In the decades shortly before the turn of the 20th century -- including the heyday of the Clayton House in the 1880s -- the people of Fort Smith saw the world through devices like the stereopticon and imagined it through thrilling tales like Arthur Conan Doyle's adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

Those simpler but strangely sophisticated times come to life Saturday when the Clayton House museum hosts its annual Family Day, this year themed "Optical Illusion Fun."

"Optical illusions were really all the rage," Julie Moncrief, museum director, says of the 1880s, when "optical illusion inventions started showing everybody the way our eyes can play tricks on us." In addition to the stereopticon, which showed images of exotic places in three dimensions by peering through a viewer, Victorian-era youngsters loved thaumatropes, toys featuring a disk with a picture on each side attached to two pieces of string. When the strings were twirled quickly between the fingers, the two pictures appeared to blend into one due to the "persistence of vision," she explains.

"All these inventions ultimately led to the modern movies," Moncrief says. "Just like today we're fascinated with the progress of 3D in movies, this was the beginning."

Visitors will also be able to watch a magic show by Chuck Larson -- a different kind of optical illusion, Moncrief points out -- and play their way through a slide show of "brain-teasing graphics."

Family Days once were called Clayton Camp and intended just for children, Moncrief adds, "but parents always wanted to come, so we changed the name to Family Day.

"In this big ol' house, the whole Clayton family did things together -- probably more than we do together," she says. "It's just a good place to see all ages having fun."

NAN What's Up on 07/31/2015