Rare antique pistols. Civil War carbines. Cased pairs of pre-war Colts. Old West revolvers and lever-action rifles. Sharps buffalo guns with the kind of provenance trails that take a lifetime to build. Lugers, Mausers, M1 Garands, and pre-war Springfields that cost as much as a used truck. All of it on display. Much of it available for sale. And standing behind every table is one of the most enthusiastic, knowledgeable antique-arms collectors you will ever meet in one room.
That is the Texas Gun Collectors Association show. Its 2026 Spring Show lands in Denton on April 24, 25, and 26, and the centerpiece this year is a members’ Parade of Sharps Firearms.
If you collect anything from the cowboy era, the Civil War, the Indian Wars, the Great War, or the Second World War — or if you simply want to stand in a room with men and women who have spent forty, fifty, sixty years chasing the pieces you have only read about — clear the weekend.
The Basics
Dates: April 24–26, 2026
Venue: Embassy Suites Hotel & Convention Center, 3100 Town Center Trail, Denton, TX 76201
Host hotel rate: $165/night through the Texas Gun Collectors Association room block. Call 940-243-3799, Option 5, and reference “TX Gun Collectors 2026.” Weekend rooms sell out. Book early.
Non-member show floor access: Contact TGCA for pricing.
Texas Gun Collectors Association members, their immediate family, and law enforcement, military, and first responders enter free. Current admission details are on the TGCA Spring Show page.
Texas Gun Collectors Association: Seventy-Six Years On
The Texas Gun Collectors Association was founded on February 27, 1950, at the Roosevelt Hotel in Waco, by a group of working collectors led by J.W. Bates of Wortham. Seventy-six years later, the club is still meeting on its original schedule — fourth weekend in April, third weekend in October — and still running on its founding premise: a collectors’ fellowship built around antique, classic, and Curio & Relic arms. Not modern. Not commercial. Membership reaches across 46 states and into collectors in Australia, Canada, England, Japan, and Switzerland.
A Show Unlike Most Others
The TGCA show floor is the kind of place that ruins commercial gun shows for you forever. The tables are loaded with rare and historically significant pieces — antique American martial arms, frontier Colts and Smith & Wessons, Sharps and Winchester long guns, World War I and World War II martial collectibles in collector grade, accoutrements, holsters, edged weapons, and the kind of documented historical artifacts that simply do not turn up at the civic center next to the AR-15 parts and beef jerky.
Just as valuable as the iron on the tables is the knowledge in the room. The men and women behind those tables have been collecting for decades — many of them since the 1960s and 1970s. They can tell a real Walker Colt from a second-generation reproduction at six paces. They know which Patersons are right and which are wrong, which Sharps carbines saw service and which were arsenal returns, which Lugers are genuine 1902 Carbines and which are fakes.
The provenance trails they carry in their heads run deeper than anything you will find anywhere else in the country. The knowledge in the room is worth the trip on its own. Bring questions. Bring a notebook. Bring your wallet — much of what is on the table is for sale.
A non-competitive display at a Texas Gun Collectors Association show is not a museum exhibit. Museum exhibits sit behind glass, curated by strangers. A TGCA display is one collector standing next to their own piece, ready to talk about it for as long as anyone is willing to listen. Rule nine of the show rules keeps the floor pure: no contemporary weapons, no exceptions.
This Show Highlights: Sharps!
The centerpiece of the 2026 Spring Show is a members’ Parade of Sharps Firearms — a non-competitive display drawn from the rifle lineage that runs from the New Model 1859 carbines carried by Berdan’s Sharpshooters through the Model 1874 buffalo guns of the Texas plains and the Creedmoor target rifles that defined American long-range shooting in the 1870s.
Christian Sharps received U.S. Patent No. 5,763 for his falling-block breech-loading action on September 12, 1848. The rifles built around that action went on to arm the 1st and 2nd United States Sharpshooters in the Civil War, kill the buffalo on the southern plains in the 1870s, and own the long-range target lines at Creedmoor. For background on the rifle family, see P&L’s complete history of Sharps rifles and the account of Berdan’s Sharpshooters in the Civil War.
The men and women bringing them to Denton are the ones who own them. That is the entire point.
Civil War: Always Strong at TGCA
Civil War material is a foundational category at every Texas Gun Collectors Association show, and the 2026 Spring Show will be no exception. Look for Springfield rifle-muskets in original configuration, Sharps carbines with documented Union service, Spencer repeating rifles and carbines, Burnside and Joslyn carbines, Colt and Remington percussion revolvers, edged weapons, holsters, cartridge boxes, belt plates, and the period photography and ephemera that round out a serious Civil War collection. The Civil War tables are where many TGCA members built their first collections forty and fifty years ago — and they keep bringing the iron back year after year. For background on the Union-side arsenal, see P&L’s Union Army arsenal: firearms of the North.
Saturday: The Auction and the Banquet
The Saturday auction has been the anchor of TGCA shows for decades. Consignments come from members’ own collections, which means lots tend to come from serious shelves rather than clearing-house inventory. Past sales have moved Colts, Winchesters, Sharps, and Civil War martial arms at prices that sometimes surprise even the people in the room. If you collect, this is a room where you can buy.
Saturday night is the banquet — the room where the annual meeting happens, the fellowship side of TGCA happens, and where most of the deals that did not get done on the floor get sketched out over dinner.
Looking Ahead
The 2026 Fall Show is already on the calendar — October 16–18, 2026, at the same venue. The TGCA forward schedule on tgca.org runs through 2032. This is a club that knows what it is doing.
One last thing. If you are a serious collector of antique American arms and you have not joined the Texas Gun Collectors Association, you should. The membership pays for itself the first time you walk a TGCA show floor.
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