Cats at historic places have even been the subject of a recent debate on a small historic house museum list-serve that I subscribe to. About half the respondents claimed nothing is better for a historic house than a living, mousing cat, and the other half exclaimed “liability, liability!” After all, cat could cause a serious allergic reaction in a visitor, who would undoubtedly hold the museum liable.
As early as the 1540s, tourism to authors’ graves occasionally began to transfer to the houses where they had lived nearby. At Petrarch’s house in Arquà, visitors could see Pertarch’s stuffed, dead cat along with the chair
where the poet sat and bed where the poet laid his weary head. Apparently, the cat inspired many a visitor to write an elegiac or even satiric poem. At sites today, I’ve often seen a “stuffed animal”-cat, but never a real feline once owned by the author. And I’ve never been moved to write a poem about them (but apparently a blog entry in another issue entirely).
However, cats at historic sites can have real appeal. The cats at Hemmingway’s Key West house have become almost as much a draw for tourists as Hemmingway himself. I wonder how many have been spirited away by Hemmingway fans.
A former caretaker at Mark Twain’s summerhouse, Quarry Farm, once declared to me that his elderly cat was a direct descendant of the cats that sat in Mark Twain’s lap while he wrote his most famous works, holed up in his famous octagonal study in Elmira, NY. He also implied that other descendents still keep the farm’s barns mouse free.
Cats at museums don’t worry me a bit, especially when compared to the damage that mice can do to historic sites. But I’d rather not see the taxidermy.
