Published May 30, 2025
Rebecca Brown / Civilwartails.com
When visitors in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania – the site of the biggest battle in the Civil War in July 1863 – enter one of the museums, they often expect to see simple dioramas of battlefield scenes with miniature soldiers. And they do – sort of.
But, when they look closer, visitors notice that the tiny soldiers each have tails sticking out of their uniforms. And, they have pointy faces. Hmmm ….
Oh, so that’s why this place is called the Civil War Tails at the Homestead Diorama Museum, which will celebrate its 10th anniversary this Labor Day and attracts about 3,000 visitors a year! It’s not a typo in the title, but a clever pun playing on tails and tales. These teeny uniformed soldier figurines are actually hand-sculpted clay cats!
“We do get a lot of people coming in … who don’t know what a diorama is, or they didn’t read the sign,” says Rebecca Brown, co-owner of Civil War Tails along with her identical twin sister, Ruth. “People will come in and halfway through the museum, they say: ‘Is that a tail? Oh, tails!’
“Looking at the sign, they read ‘tales’ or ‘trails.’ They might wonder why we have a typo on our sign,” Rebecca says. “It is fun when people are like, ‘What’s that? They are all cats. All of them?’ … Even if you see the tail, the brain doesn’t know what to do with it.”
The sisters live above the museum on the second floor with their two cats: gray tabbies Aubrey and Kenzie, who stay upstairs to prevent mischief and feline vandalism in the dioramas – but, visitors will encounter Joanie, the super-friendly pit bull mix who serves as the museum dog. Ruth and Rebecca did have a museum cat, a brown tabby named Kitty, but the cat sadly died in 2020.
Rebecca Brown, co-owner of Civil War Tails at the Homestead Diorama Museum along with her identical twin sister, Ruth. Rebecca Brown / Civilwartails.com
While you walk among the dioramas, with the player piano in the museum providing musical entertainment, you can look closely at the three-dimensional scenes the tiny soldier cats are depicting, like on battlefields and ships, and read the written information posted about the scene from history. Diorama themes include the Little Round Top battle at Gettysburg, the naval battle between two ironclad ships in the Civil War, and Fort Sumter, where the opening shots of the Civil War were fired in 1861.
Dioramas depict key Civil War scenes: Little Round Top, the ironclad naval battle, and the 1861 attack on Fort Sumter. Kellie Gormly / Cats.com
It’s a delightful way to spend a couple of hours in this hallowed region of Pennsylvania, where more than 50,000 men became casualties from the battle that raged July 1 to 3, 1863.
Girls Who Loved Cats
What started as a childhood hobby of making cat figurines from oven-baked modeling clay became the Civil War Tails museum years later. Rebecca and Ruth Brown grew up with pet cats and, as Rebecca puts it: “We pretty much cat-ified everything.” When the girls, who were raised in the Philadelphia suburbs, did Robin Hood role-playing as a game, they were cats, and the bad guys were dogs.
When Rebecca was 11, she read books about Civil War generals – specifically, about Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, who led the Southern troops at Gettysburg, and Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who was not at Gettysburg but ended up commander of all Union forces. The crafty kid used modeling clay to make figures of the two generals, between 2 and 2.5 inches tall. Without really thinking about it, Rebecca instinctually made the Lee and Grant figures look like cats.
“They just came out as cats; we didn’t think anything of it,” Rebecca says. “People asked us why. We had to reverse-engineer our thinking to think how they came out as cats.”
Kellie Gormly / Cats.com
The girls started making many miniature cats in themes, like battles. While in high school, the Brown twins worked in a retirement community, and they brought a diorama to the business to display for the residents, who loved it. Residents recommended that Ruth and Rebecca start taking cat historical dioramas to schools, but moving something so delicate and heavy was a daunting task. The Brown sisters started pondering the possibility of launching a museum, and as history buffs, they started looking at properties in Gettysburg. They bought the property where the museum stands, right by Soldiers National Cemetery on Baltimore Street, in 2013, and opened the museum in 2015.
A Quirky Museum
Rebecca Brown / Cats.com
Today, at Civil War Tails, history buffs can learn important lessons about the Battle of Gettysburg and other battles with a playful, whimsical, unique touch, Ruth says.
“It’s not just dry history but stories of real people,” she says. Viewing the museum’s battle dioramas, Ruth says, visitors get “inspiration, things that make you reflect a bit … also just a sense for what it would have looked like.”
Both Rebecca and Ruth take turns making the model cats and doing the historical research, and work as a team; they love to “geek out” as they learn. They recently completed their 10,000th cat – and that doesn’t include the ones they have given away or sold in the gift shop. Over the years, they have shrunk the size of their figurines, and now, the cats they make are about ¾ inch tall. Behind the scenes, Ruth is working on building a diorama depicting a cavalry clash in Maryland in 1864. Rebecca is working on a naval diorama depicting the Confederate CSS Virginia and the Union USS Cumberland – of course, helmed and staffed by cat sailors.
Kids visiting enjoy the cuteness of the cats and lean about history – an improvement over staring at a screen all day, Ruth says. Adults who love cats often come to Civil War Tails specifically to see the cat figurines, but they leave with a desire to read more about President Abraham Lincoln and other aspects of Civil War history.
“It’s just been really fun for us to see,” Ruth says.
Civil War Tails at the Homestead Diorama Museum is usually open every day of the week year-round, except for Wednesdays and Sundays. 717-420-5273; https://civilwartails.com
