Relic Room hosts 32nd SCMMS Toy Soldier Show – Oct 28
October 24, 2023
On Saturday, October 28, the S.C. Confederate Relic Room & Military Museum will again host the South Carolina Military Miniature Society’s Annual Toy Soldier Show.
This is the SCMMS’ 32nd annual show, and the Relic Room’s second time as a venue for the event. Having hosted last year, we now know that this gathering offers more than just a bunch of little green plastic guys like the ones you used to buy at the five and dime.
One thing will be very different this year: The event will be held entirely upstairs, and due to renovations that are under way, you can’t get there through the atrium leading from the front doors of the State Museum. Drive around the left side of the Columbia Mills building that contains the museums, park on the second floor of the parking garage near the back, and enter from there.
Admission is free. The event runs from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
This year’s show is still coming together, but last year’s included:
• Toy soldiers, of course. But they were all shapes, sizes and styles, from every era in military history.
• Models of all kinds – airplanes, ships, tanks, and anything else that can be miniaturized. They ran the gamut from finished works by professionals to plastic kits you can build yourself, still in the box.
• Dioramas, and not just of the military variety. One of the most complicated such displays at last year’s show was of a busy 19th-century Bavarian beer garden. Another showed an English fox hunt. Still another envisioned a zombie apocalypse.
• Living history displays. There were authentically costumed and equipped re-enactors portraying soldiers, sailors and even a few civilian partisans from the American Revolution, the First and Second World Wars, Vietnam, and more. Some were generic, and others played very specific historical figures, and were prepared to describe “their” roles in history in some detail.
About the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum
Founded in 1896, the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum is an accredited museum focusing on South Carolina’s distinguished martial tradition through the Revolutionary War, Mexican War, Civil War, Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, Vietnam, the War on Terror, and other American conflicts. It serves as the state’s military history museum by collecting, preserving, and exhibiting South Carolina’s military heritage from the colonial era to the present, and by providing superior educational experiences and programming. It recently opened a major new exhibit, “A War With No Front Lines: South Carolina and the Vietnam War, 1965-1973.” The museum is located at 301 Gervais St. in Columbia, sharing the Columbia Mills building with the State Museum. For more information, go to https://crr.sc.gov/.
