Relic Room to host 32nd SCMMS Toy Soldier Show

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 we’re expecting a lot, based on what we saw last year, which 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.

There will be a model-painting competition, and exhibitors and vendors of all the things mentioned above.

We hope to see you there.