Today we start a two-part Mewsing. Part One looks at how we developed a childhood hobby into a successful business. Part Two will encourage you (kids and adults alike) to take some of the lessons we have learned from our experience and apply them to your own lives.

We were homeschooled all the way through high school. Growing up, we enjoyed reading, and our mom would pick up books on all subjects. Two of them were biographies about Generals Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee. When we were 11, Rebecca read those biographies and liked the generals. So, she made them out of modeling clay.

We had always fiddled with clay, making all sorts of little animals. And since we had cats as pets, when we were kids everything was about cats. It was only natural (in our minds) that when Rebecca made the generals out of clay, they came out as cats in uniform with beards.

We kept reading Civil War books and kept making clay cats of people who caught our interest. After a couple of years, we began to set them up in small scenes of the events we were reading about. Over time, the dioramas became larger and more detailed and accurate.

Our parents created an encouraging environment for creativity and learning, allowing us to pursue our interests. They never told us we were silly for making Civil War cats. Instead, they invested their time to take us to battlefields and reenactments. They fed our interest by buying us hundreds of Civil War books over the years. Dad helped us build the topographical bases for our largest dioramas. Mom contributed fabric for tents and flags on the dioramas and helped us to sew Civil War dresses for the lessons we taught in high school. Mom and Dad are still our biggest fans, still supporting and encouraging us in many, many ways. Civil War Tails would not have been possible without them.

So how did this hobby become a museum?

When we were kids, we transported our clay cats in boxes that we labeled “Clay Civil War Cat Museum.” Obviously, we had no museum and no particular reason to believe we would. But that was our dream.

All the way through high school and college, that’s all it was: a dream. We knew what we liked to do—but a hobby is not a career. And it seemed a grandiose dream: we could never start a museum!

But Rebecca took small business courses during college, just toying with the museum idea.

After college, Ruth became a lawyer, but Rebecca never knew what she wanted to be when she grew up. She remembers thinking, “I just like making dioramas.” Eventually, she realized, “No, I also enjoy sharing them with others.” But even then, she didn’t know what to do with that realization.

High school gave us two opportunities that turned out to be “trial runs” before a variety of people and ages. We didn’t know what was to come, but we did see that everyone really liked our Civil War dioramas of little clay cats. We taught Civil War lessons to other homeschooled students who really enjoyed seeing the dioramas we used as visual aids.

We also worked as waitstaff at a retirement community. Mom told us, “If you make friends with the residents, they’ll become like grandparents to you.” And she was right. We loved the residents there. Naturally, we wanted to share our clay cats with them, and so began the tradition of taking the dioramas in for one afternoon a year, for the residents and staff.

Every year, one resident, Helen, would say, “You should take these into schools!” And we would laugh and joke, “You wanna be our agent?”

In 2012, Rebecca thought, “Maybe I should consider the idea, instead of brushing it off each year.” She did, but we soon realized that travel is hard on the dioramas, and they were multiplying and getting larger.

So we decided, “Maybe we should bring the kids to the dioramas, instead of the dioramas to the kids.” We began searching for a commercial property in Gettysburg, in order to start a museum. But we would not have taken that step if we had not finally listened to Helen.

Now, here we are, having made our hobby into a career. A dream come true!

Stay tuned for Part Two, where we’ll consider life after the dream becomes reality—and give you some takeaways to inspire your own journey!