Travel the World in Maysville—in Miniature

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Maysville's historic Russell Theatre in miniature.

Photos courtesy KSB Miniatures Collection at The Kentucky Gateway Museum Center

What do Rosemary Clooney, Princess Diana, and really tiny chairs have in common? The Kathleen Savage Browning (KSB) Miniatures Collection.

Housed in the Kentucky Gateway Museum Center in Maysville, this spectacular exhibit is the result of Kaye Browning’s forty years of traveling, acquiring, and commissioning artisans to recreate buildings, rooms, and household items of historical and cultural significance in miniature.

Just more than an hour’s drive southeast of Cincinnati, the museum offers visitors the chance to travel the world through the KSB Collection.

The collection’s signature piece is the Spencer House—the ancestral home of Lady Diana, Princess of Wales. With elaborate rugs woven on full-size looms, real gold leaf trim, sterling silver flatware, oil painting imitations of the Spencer family portraits, and replicas of the home’s furnishings, this one-twelfth-scale model of the Spencer House—complete with the impressive Greek, Roman, and Italianate style façade—is the closest you’ll get to visiting the original without boarding a flight to London.

While the 3,300 square-foot gallery includes rooms, vignettes, and period furnishings spanning all different eras and cultures, it also includes a few local buildings, such as miniature models of Maysville’s Bethel Baptist Church and the Russell Theatre.

The iconic Russell Theater was built in 1929 and made notable in 1953 when it was chosen for the premier of Rosemary Clooney’s first film, The Stars Are Singing. The stunning miniature of this atmospheric theater includes the ornamentation, balconies, and busts of the original, all enclosed in an 11,000 hand-cut brick frame.

Stop by on a rainy fall afternoon or spend a Saturday getting lost in the details of life that are crafted in miniature for the KSB Collection.

215 Sutton Street, Maysville, KY, (606) 564-5865, ksbminiaturescollection.com

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