The simple word “toy” makes anyone smile because it awakens memories. The word also produces nostalgia for childhood. Toys were intended for amusement and education, and they delighted their owners and aided them in their growth and understanding.

The Old Salem Toy Museum presents a fascinating seventeen-hundred-year survey of toys, circa 225 A.D. to 1925. Serving as a treasure chest of more than 1200 antique European and American toys exhibiting playthings that people have enjoyed for nearly two thousand years.

Here 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.

Like children around the world, those who lived in one of the historic Moravian towns in piedmont North Carolina – Bethabara, Bethania, Salem, Friedberg, Freidland, or Hope – played with toys, and, because of this, toys have been part of the extensive Old Salem collection since the museum began in 1950. 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.