The National Museum of Toys and Miniatures explores what it means to play
Courtesy photo
Founded as the Toy and Miniature Museum of Kansas City in 1982 by Barbara Marshall and Mary Harris Francis, the cozy and unassuming Tureman Mansion at UMKC houses one of Kansas City’s many incredible museums.
Split between two floors—the ground floor housing the miniatures and the top housing the toys—the museum dives into the history of play and the art of miniatures.
Curator of Collections Amy McKune gave The Pitch an in-depth history of the museum and introduced us to some of the iconic items they have on display. She showed us around Narcissa Niblack Thorne’s English Cotswold Cottage, a 1:12 miniature diorama of a 17th-century English home. As we looked around the room, McKune explained that this specific piece actually went missing for over 50 years; it was returned to the Thorne family for refurbishment in the 1960s and didn’t resurface until it popped up for auction in Chicago in 2019.
McKune also made sure to highlight the Barbie Scavenger Hunt and pointed out that almost every room on the toy floor contains at least one Barbie. (If you’re still feeling that Barbie fever, make sure to stop by and take a look.)
Other tour highlights included Barbara Marshall’s final commission for the museum, the Art Deco Jewelry Store. It’s a collaborative effort from several artists to capture essentially the platonic ideal of an older high-end jewelry store. The Iconic Toys hall held toys from across American history—McKune said she likes to call this room the “hall of multigenerational connection.”
Each of these toys was hand-picked to evoke pure nostalgia for the era they came from to invite parents, grandparents, and children to bond over their shared memories of play.
The National Museum of Toys and Miniatures is located at 5235 Oak St., Kansas City, MO 64112. It is open every day except Tuesdays from 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.
