The Old Salem Toy Museum Celebrates Fourth Year

Winston-Salem, N.C.

:Throughout December, Winston-Salem's historic district is alive with candlelight tours and caroling, wagon rides and visits from St Nick. At the Old Salem Toy Museum, however, the presents are already unwrapped.

The gift of Thomas A. Gray and his mother, the late Anne Pepper Gray (1921–2003), the Old Salem Toy Museum — one of four institutions that together make up Old Salem Museums and Gardens — houses 1,200 antique playthings dating from 225 to 1925. On view are European, British and American dolls and dollhouses, menageries, circuses, parlor toys, transportation toys, German wooden toys, seasonal toys, and children's dishes, furniture, uniforms and sporting equipment.

At the heart of the collection are toys made for and used by the children of the Moravian settlers who established Salem in 1766. In 1913, Salem merged with nearby Winston to create Winston-Salem. Founded in 1950 with the aim of preserving the city's historic center, Old Salem Museums and Gardens today maintains 12 restored or reconstructed exhibit buildings and 11 restored gardens open to the public. The Toy Museum is housed in the Frank L. Horton Museum Center on Old Salem's 86-acre campus.

The Grays have long been prominent in the region. The family founded Wachovia National Bank, the forerunner of Wachovia Bank and Trust Co., and boasts four past chairmen of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. One of them, Bowman Gray Sr (1874–1935), contributed heavily to Wake Forest University, among other charities. Between 1927 and 1932, Gray and his wife created Graylyn, a country estate now managed as a conference center by Wake Forest. After a fire destroyed a portion of the estate in 1980, Gray's grandnephew Tom Gray served as preservation consultant for its restoration.

A regular visitor to the Winter Antiques Show, the Philadelphia Antiques Show and Antiques Week in New Hampshire, Tom Gray is an Americana collector whose personal interests include Connecticut River Valley furniture, English delft, brass, hooked and shirred rugs and stone garden ornaments. A 1974 Winterthur graduate, Gray has devoted his life to decorative arts and historic preservation.

Formerly vice president of Old Salem, Inc, and director of the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA), another Old Salem property, Gray has been an Old Salem trustee since 1981 and was the organization's chairman from 1994 to 1997. He will join the Old Salem delegation to New York City this January 19–28 when the Winter Antiques Show showcases MESDA in a 40-object loan show, "Southern Perspective: A Sampling From The Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts."

"It's the first time our greatest treasures have left the museum since 1965. These pieces will open people's eyes to the splendor of the South," says Gray, who has been involved in every aspect of the planning.