North Carolina repository is a feline find
SYLVA, North Carolina – America has a number of museums devoted to niche topics but Harold Sims decided they had overlooked one area for far too long.
“I thought we needed a cat museum in this country, so I decided to build one,” says Sims, 84. “People thought I was crazy. They told me that nobody wanted a cat museum. Well it turned out that a lot of people did.”
The American Museum of the House Cat, the tangible result of Sims’ desire to “honor the house cat,” opened in 2017. Since then, he says, more than 15,000 people – including tourists from Russia, China and England – have come through through this small, inconspicuous building just off U.S. 441 in rural western North Carolina.
Unofficially, it’s the largest and most visited museum in the United States solely dedicated to domesticated felines. It’s also just one of nine on Earth and two in the United States, according to Sims.
“It’s not the best in the world,” he says. “But it’s probably the best in this country, by a long shot.”
The other is Ohio’s Feline History Museum, which features at least two things that the American Museum of the House Cat does not: living cats and a functional cat house designed by the late modernist architect Frank Lloyd Wright, which did not impress Sims, despite its pedigree.
“If I were a cat, I wouldn’t want to live in it,” he says. “It’s really small, with low ceilings. Not easy to live in.”
Sims’ own museum features a flamboyantly painted towering tree-trunk house cat, which he says dates to early 17th-century Borneo.
“It must have been beautiful wood at some point,” he laments. “But then some idiot painted over it and messed up a good antique.”
Around the corner lies an authentic mummified cat from ancient Egypt. It’s wrapped up, as though sleeping.
As Sims tells it, “the cat was a god” to ancient Egyptians, who worshiped felines and believed they could carry a human’s spirit into the afterlife. This cat was killed and placed alongside an unidentified human corpse as a sort of spiritual escort, a practice he denounces as unnecessarily brutal.
Sims plans to write a book about the mummified kitty – dubbed Hebony – in which the heroic feline will uncover the truth about the Egyptians’ cat-slaying rituals.
Spoiler alert: Things do not end well for Hebony.
“He finds out that cats are being killed for people’s graves, so he undertakes a quest to figure out what’s going on,” Sims says. “He discovers what’s happening, and becomes a whistleblower, of sorts. But they eventually catch him, mummify him. And that’s the end.”
Catitude adjustment
After a career that included a stint in the Navy, earning a doctorate in education and working as a marine biologist and college professor, Sims retired to the mountains of Western North Carolina with his wife and began his transition to what some have dubbed “a crazy old cat man.”
Sometime after losing his first cat, a Persian named Buzzy, the couple spotted a stray cat walking up their road. So they took it under their wing. Then they got another one. And another. And another.
“Now we have 13 of them,” he says. It was around this time that Sims became intrigued by the personality of house cats. He began devouring literature about them, and his passion only increased the deeper he delved.
“The more I learned, the more I began to believe that they’re smarter than we are,” he says. In addition, “cats don’t discriminate. They don’t care if you’re white or black or yellow. Plus, cats don’t care about what other cats have. A cat has what it has, and that’s fine with him.”
The former Navy man adds, “Cats don’t start wars. They have no gods to pray to. They don’t mess up the environment. They just live ... I wish cats could
rule the world. We wouldn’t be in such a mess if that were the case. People think I’m crazy. But by God, cats know how to live.”
Welcome to Catman2
Sims has done much more for his feline companions than simply memorialize them and their myriad likenesses in a museum. He also has helped improve the lives of cats in Jackson County, where he resides.
Around the time that he became borderline – or perhaps totally – obsessed with house cats, he discovered that every shelter in the county killed its cats if they weren’t adopted within a given time period. So in 1996, he set out to build the county’s first no-kill institution.
That shelter, now known as Catman2 (”Like Katmandu,” Sims explains), is still going strong today. At any given time, it’s home to about 70 cats. Not only are they no longer living on death row, but they live cage-free.
Some of the creatures have arrived at Catman2 by strange means.
“One day, this barefooted guy came to the door,” Sims recalls. “He had hair down the back of his neck, a sheet over his body and a cat in his arms. He was apparently going to jail for marijuana and he wanted us to take his cat.
“He loved the thing, and wanted to make sure it was taken care of. So we took him in, and the guy was thankful, and said he’d pay us someday, if he could.”
Before the man left, Sims asked him for the cat’s name.
“Oh,” the guy responded. “It’s Mary Jane.”
A place to call home
Sims originally wanted to put his museum in Asheville. Often considered the East Coast’s answer to Austin, the city of 91,000 prides itself on its cultural weirdness. If there were ever a place befitting of a cat museum, Asheville would be it.
“I couldn’t afford a plot of land in Asheville,” he says. “Then, three years ago, I found this place,” he says of Sylva, a quaint town of about 2,600 people about an hour southwest of Asheville best known as a filming location for the Oscar-winning 2017 movie “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”
Two years after opening the museum, Sims already is constructing a new location across the street that, when finished, will be three times larger than its current space.
Sims already has mapped out in his mind what some of it will look like, with be two sliding barn doors out front, with a cat on each: one happy and one sad. The happy cat represents all rescued felines, while the sad one represents those searching for a forever home. The archway over the door will be made into an enormous cat, à la the world famous Cat Museum in Kuching, Borneo, from which Sims draws much inspiration.
“It’s going to be a big ‘wow’ for people when they walk in,” Sims says. “And when they leave, it’ll be, ‘I can’t believe he did that.’ Hopefully, it’ll live on long after I’m gone.”
What comes next?
What becomes of the American Museum of the House Cat after Sims is gone is something he worries about. He’s in his mid-80s, and despite being in generally good health, he won’t live forever. He has poured his time and money into the museum, and there doesn’t appear to be a clear heir.
“Some days, I feel like a dinosaur that just keeps trying to survive,” he says.
But all of that is in the future. For now, Sims and his museum are thriving. He’s pursuing his eccentric passion, well into his golden years, and his adoration of felines has bled into his creative life.
Sims’ love of felines has inspired a book, “Poems, Songs and Other Silly Things about Cats,” which is available at the museum.
A poem in the collection is “Why Folks Call Me Catman.” It has a Suessian rhythm, and it ends like this:
Soon people were bringing me cats and my new name began/The people were calling me, that Old Catman/So don’t sit around when you retire/Find something that you might wish to aspire/People won’t call you the Catman, because that’s what they called me/But they will give you a nickname, you just wait and see
Details
Location: 4704 Hwy 441 South, Sylva, North Carolina, 28779
Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. EDT
Admission and information: https://www.catman2.org/the-american-museum-of-the-house-cat.html