Today we look at another set of FAQs, this time about how we started. (You can find our first FAQ Mewsing here.)

“What inspired this?”

The simple answer is, “It just happened.” When we were 11 years old, Rebecca read biographies of Generals Lee and Grant. Liking the two generals, she made them out of modeling clay. Then we became interested in the Civil War and kept making the officers we liked, and troops for them to command. Making our armies kept us reading, and reading fed our armies. A few years into it, we began making dioramas, inspired by the stories we read. Sometimes, we show generic scenes, such as a camp. But most often, we show a specific story. Our first “permanent” diorama (i.e. on a shelf, not the floor) portrayed the moment when Gen. Jackson received his nickname “Stonewall” at First Bull Run, showing that even early in our Civil War interest, it was the stories of the individuals that fascinated us.

“Why cats?” – the most common question we hear. Since we always had cats as pets when we were kids, we “catified” and personified everything. And so Lee and Grant naturally came out as cats in uniform, with beards.

“Is there a deeper meaning to their being cats?”

Nope! In fact, we can tell that there was no conscious intent because, a few years later in high school, when people started asking, “Why are they cats?” Rebecca’s initial reaction was, “I don’t know. I was eleven; I wasn’t thinking about remembering why I did it.” So, we had to ponder and surmise what our 11-year-old selves were thinking! It helped when we remembered that when we would play Robin Hood as kids, we would always be cats, and the imaginary Sheriff of Nottingham and bad guys would be dogs. So clearly the “catification” of humans began well before we made Lee and Grant out of clay. Now, their being cats serves a purpose by making the difficult subject of the Civil War accessible to visitors, both children and adults alike.