The American Museum of the House Cat

The story

Harold W. Sims Jr. did not set out to run a museum. He served in the Navy, worked as a marine biologist, earned a doctorate in education, and taught 22 years at a community college in Clearwater, Florida before retiring into the North Carolina mountains, where a stray wandered up his road and the household count went, in his word, "like popcorn." In 1996 he and his wife Kay opened Catman2, the county's first no-kill shelter, run cage-free on his theory that a cat hauled out of a cage meets its adopter with its guard up. The museum came later, for a blunt reason: "I thought we needed a cat museum in this country, so I decided to build one." He priced land in Asheville, balked, and settled on Sylva.

It opened in 2017 inside the since-closed Old School Antique Mall and pulled more than 18,000 visitors in three years. In 2020 Sims began moving everything into its own building on US-441; COVID stalled the finish, and the doors stayed shut until spring 2023, after which 12,000 people came through in a year. The holdings are thirty-odd years of accumulation — fine art from the late 1800s, folk art, rare cat advertising, antique toy cats, art glass, vintage posters, clocks — alongside an Egyptian mummified cat of roughly 332–30 BCE that Sims named Hebony and intended to make the hero of a novel.

Sims died in 2024, and the museum carried on as the shelter's fundraising arm: admission money funds Catman2 programs including discounted spay-neuter, with shelter director Kaleb Lynch and heritage director Julie Heather Kimbrell among those keeping it running. Five resident MuseumCats — Amelie, Oliver, Finnegan, Galileo and Keelie — have the run of the place.