March 28, 2025 | Brittney J. Miller

In a 2,000-sq.-ft. room, a family is surrounded by crimson poppy fields and fluttering butterflies. A cluster of radiant green buildings glimmers on the horizon. A father, mother and two daughters hold hands as they grow closer and closer to the famously fictitious city, skipping down the yellow brick road at their feet.

This one-of-a-kind journey to the Emerald City is only available at the Wizard of Oz Museum in Cape Canaveral, where visitors can learn more about the iconic storyline that has captured the world for more than a century. The man behind the curtain is Fred Trust — a long-time collector and world-renowned expert of all things Oz.

Trust remembers hearing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz for the first time as a schoolboy in the former Soviet Union, when his teacher read portions of the book daily. Penned in Russian, it was one of the 50-plus translations of the beloved American children’s story — a history Trust didn’t know until years after he immigrated to the U.S. and started reading the original version to his own children.

The story’s long-time impact on pop culture — an influence he wasn’t aware of as a child — drew him in. He discovered the 39 other books in the Oz universe, their storylines extending far beyond the plot of the iconic 1939 Wizard of Oz movie. As he started collecting them, Trust noticed tiny differences between copies. A missing drawing, a colored panel, a typo. Each variation, he found, revealed which edition the books were — which, more importantly for collectors, divulged their worth.

Trust posted his findings on a website, and garnered attention. (He even created a price guide for the series that has sold more than 10,000 copies.) He started searching for copies in earnest and expanded his hunt into other Ozrelated items. His resulting collection — now numbering more than 2,000 items — was displayed in venues like Geppi’s Entertainment Museum in Baltimore and the Land of Oz theme park in Beech Mountain, N.C.

About three years ago, Trust decided to house the collection in his own museum, which is located about six minutes from Port Canaveral and less than a half hour’s drive from the Kennedy Space Center. “When I opened the museum, what I noticed is that most people are aware of the movie. The movie brings them in,” says Trust, now 64. “But we try not to show them the movie or give them facts about the movie, because all of this is public information. ... We try to show some other elements, like the influence the book had on American culture.”

Leveraging SEO and tech

The Wizard of Oz Museum may grab eyes with its bright green exterior. But what convinces potential patrons to come inside, Trust says, are the stats he proudly displays on a sign out front: The museum was Tripadvisor’s 2024 No. 1 attraction on the Space Coast, and it has garnered a 4.9-star rating among more than 2,500 Google reviews.

On a revolving monitor inside, Trust advertises more honors his business has accumulated from its three-plus years and 20,000 annual visitors. As of January, the museum averaged five stars on Tripadvisor, where it also ranked among the top 10 art, specialty and children’s museums in Florida. Last year, it was a finalist in the North American Arival TourReview Spotlight Awards. The Guide to Florida named it as a “Best of Florida” winner in the museum category.

The accolades give the museum credibility, Trust says, luring more foot traffic his way. Every visitor watches a two-minute video so they know what to expect from the experience before buying a ticket. And then, as patrons leave, Trust encourages them to leave their own review via QR codes on the exit doors.

“That’s one of the ways we’ve been able to accumulate so many (reviews) compared to other businesses that have been here for 10 years,” he says. “What we’re creating is really unique, and people love it.”

He estimates that tourists spend around 45 minutes in his museum. How does he make his $30 adult tickets and $15 children’s tickets — with other ticket options featuring discounts for seniors and military members — worth it? And how does he compete with neighboring attractions, like the Kennedy Space Center?

With passion and intrigue and ingenuity (oh, my!).

For instance, Trust is wielding his 30-year career in computer science to create an exhibit similar to the Dalí Alive 360 experience in St. Petersburg’s Salvador Dalí museum and the Van Gogh immersive experience at Miami’s Olympia Theater. His museum’s version features never-visualized- before scenes from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz books — all creative works he has painstakingly created himself. He makes use of 31 projectors to bring them to life in a 2,000-sq.-ft. rectangular room.

One scene, for instance, features the Tin Man proposing to a munchkin girl. Another shows field mice rescuing the Cowardly Lion from a sleep-inducing poppy field. One even incorporates high-resolution images from the James Webb telescope as an homage to the Kennedy Space Center. Those creations are then projected onto the walls and floor, allowing visitors to be part of the iconic storyline themselves.

It can take a year to create a four-minute scene, Trust says. He currently has 15 minutes of Oz-related content showing in the immersive experience. To fill more time, the exhibit is also displaying 15 minutes of Van Gogh paintings and history, which only took Trust three months to create since the imagery is in the public domain.

Over the years, Fred Trust collected more than 2,000 Oz-related items (worth upwards of $10 million) that he’s incorporated into his Cape Canaveral museum.

“When you get to the Wizard of Oz, you don’t have a base to start from, so you have to really create everything from scratch. That’s why it takes so long,” Trust says. “Complexity-wise, it’s approximately 1-to-20 between the Van Gogh and the Wizard of Oz (content creation). That’s what people really love.”

Over the years, Fred Trust collected more than 2,000 Oz-related items (worth upwards of $10 million) that he’s incorporated into his Cape Canaveral museum.

Westward expansion

There’s no place like home. But, last year, Trust had a big announcement: The Wizard of Oz Museum will be expanding into Central Florida come 2026.

He put a deposit on a four-acre lot in Kissimmee, about 30 miles south of Orlando, on his birthday on Oct. 10, 2023. And he officially signed the contract last year on May 15 — which, coincidentally, would have been Oz author L. Frank Baum’s 168th birthday.

According to Trust’s calculations of bed taxes, the new location sees nine times as many tourists as Cape Canaveral — an existing clientele and revenue stream that he can tap into. The spot is just around the corner from the Medieval Times Dinner & Tournament attraction and about a 20-minute drive from Walt Disney World.

“We know what we have. It’s theoretically a proof of concept that it’s working,” Trust says about his current set-up. “People are interested, and as long as we continue improving and adding more things, it’s going to enhance the experience, and we will have people visiting us.”

The new museum will take on a sparkling, reimagined persona.

It will keep the emerald-green hue of the current property but better replicate the Emerald City in its design, with initial plans featuring gold accents and palace-like spires and towers. (Trust estimates that the existing museum loses 20% of potential visitors because of its outward appearance, which, apart from its color, isn’t on theme.) It will also feature a mini-golf course — taking advantage of the vestiges of the Viking Motel that once stood on the property — as well as a Wizard of Oz puppet show and a cafeteria with Oz-themed goodies.

The site will nearly triple Trust’s exhibit space to 5,800 square feet, sporting a capacity for 70 cabinets of items. The immersive experience will double to 4,000 square feet, and the gift shop will more than triple to 1,800 square feet. The new location will be directly competing with Orlando’s big-name attractions. With his digital presence, though, Trust isn’t too worried.

“Most of the attractions depend on their being there for so long. People already know about them, and they depend on word of mouth,” he says. “I’m really concentrating on Google and Tripadvisor because of my background in computer science. I’m trying to get people from the internet to find me.”

That doesn’t mean his business’ future is void of wicked challenges.

For one, it’s a private museum — all its content belongs to Trust, and he funds its operations. He doesn’t benefit from the donations and grants that allow traditional nonprofit museums to offer reduced-price or free tickets, which are more appealing to tourists. But he doesn’t want to risk losing ownership of his collection if he makes his enterprise a nonprofit.

He hopes that, if the museum’s profits stay reliable, he can get a bank loan to finance future improvements. Until then, he plans on funding the new museum from the ground up. If permit applications go according to plan, he hopes the new location will be operational by the end of 2026.

There’s also the matter of what will fill the new museum — or if the Cape Canaveral location will stay open. His lease there is up in June 2026 and it’s unclear whether he plans to renew. Should both locations stay open, he would transfer some of his displayed artifacts — plus many more still in storage — to Orlando for their time in the spotlight.

“It’s not your traditional museum where you go in and quietly spend couple of hours, and most people get bored,” he says. “What we’re creating is really unique. People love it.”

What’s Inside

In the museum’s 2,000-sq.-ft. main exhibit space, visitors can peruse 46 cabinets stuffed to the brim with Oz-related lore. They can move around the room chronologically, scanning QR codes to follow an audio tour from decade to decade.

The exhibits start with an original 1850 diary from the family of L. Frank Baum, the author who published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900. They span the 1902 musical, the 1910 and 1925 silent movies, and of course, the 1939 movie. They cover Michael Jackson’s role as the scarecrow in the 1975 The Wiz musical, and Disney’s 1985 Return to Oz movie. The museum also dives into the Broadway musical Wicked, which serves as a prequel to The Wizard of Oz, and the 2024 movie based on the hit.

The destination displays a breadth of rare books. Trust’s favorite is the first-known complete copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz — a prepublication dated May 23, 1900, about three months before the book was published with a cover. Other treasures include big-screen memorabilia like a spear prop, the costume jacket of an Emerald City resident, and one of the seven original Dorothy dresses Judy Garland wore in the film. The museum also traces Oz-themed merchandise through the ages, from a 1930s vacuum cleaner to 1960s peanut butter to modern-day dolls.

Altogether, Trust estimates his collection is valued between $10 million and $12 million. “The point of this is that it’s history,” he says. “If we never display to (visitors), they would never know anything about it.”

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