Saturday, December 26, 2009
Old Salem Toy Museum
The Old Salem Toy Museum contains a wide variety of rare, old toys, mostly from the 19th and early 20th century a large collection of antique doll houses. Other toys include dolls, games, cars, trains, airplanes, teddy bears, puppets and toy zoos from Europe and America.
In this Museum you can see third century toys that archaeologists dredged from the Thames River in London—miniature bronze firearms from 1585 to 1610, and a lead die dating back to 225 A.D. You can see toys Moravian children played with in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. You can find a variety of German toys—ships and marbles, games and puzzles, cars and trains. You can see dolls from the seventeenth century through the earliest twentieth century. You can look at teddy bears and puppets, doll houses and toy zoos, and toys made of porcelain, silver or cast iron. There are toys from Germany, Great Britain, Holland, France, Spain, and America. The most recent are early-twentieth-century airplanes and automobiles.
Most of Old Salem’s toys date from the nineteenth century, and we are fortunate in many cases to know who owned and played with these charming treasures. Many of them were imported from Germany, the toy-making capital of the world at that time, but some were made in Moravian homes or by one of the talented local craftsmen. It is important to remember that the toys enjoyed by Moravian children were just a part of a much broader universe of toys with histories dating back centuries. 
It is this larger historical context of toys that the founders of Old Salem’s Toy Museum, Thomas A. Gray and his mother, Anne Pepper Gray, wanted to clearly represent. Tom and Anne have been generous and dedicated supporters of Old Salem for many years. As consummate collectors themselves, they knew that a world-class toy collection could be assembled and that it would have a wide appeal.
After only a few years of intense and purposeful collecting, Tom and Anne had amassed a superb and delightful collection of toys that, along with Old Salem’s toy collection, became the Old Salem Toy Museum, located on South Main Street in the Frank L. Horton Museum Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
The Salem Witch Museum brings you back to Salem 1692 for a dramatic overview of the Witch Trials, including stage sets with life-size figures, lighting and a narration.
North German Toy Museum, Soltau
The North German Toy Museum in Soltau originated from a private collection. It was founded in 1984 by Hannelore Ernst.
The museum is located in a listed building which consists of a shop and house in the centre of Soltau. Exhibits from four centuries recall something of the history of toys and culture.Covering an exhibition area of around 600m² and receives 40,000 visitors a year. The North German Toy Museum has been presenting one of the world's most diverse toy collections since 1988. There are also opportunities to play with some of the toys. In this house of dreams, there's a whole miniature world to explore across three floors: teddy bears, carousels, optical toys, magic lanterns, puppet theatres, picture books, games and construction kits, wooden and paper toys; ranging from a historical model railway to a collection of Steiff animals and numerous objects from the nurseries of the 1920s. The main attraction is Dingley Hall, a three metre wide and 2 metre high a huge doll's house that was bought in 2003. Open all year round.
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