The Old Courthouse Heritage Museum in Inverness has quite a storied past.

Once the center of life for Citrus County residents, the building gained worldwide attention when an A-list celebrity filmed a movie there.

Today, the museum honors its history while offering exhibitions and events that keep it as relevant as ever.

Inverness is located 90 miles north of Tampa on the west coast of Florida.

I love the small town feel.

[music] We are thankfully very underdeveloped.

We're on the nature coast and there's a lot of nature here, and it's just a beautiful area to come and see for a lot of different reasons.

It's got about 7800 people, and maybe on the outskirts there might be 10,000.

But the whole key here is that it's been around for 125 years.

This building was actually the original courthouse of the town.

The building is now a history museum.

This building was really the center of the community's life here in not only in Inverness, but in Citrus County.

And it was also the county seat.

You had the school board, the sheriff on different county entities, the clerk based here in this building.

There's all kinds of history of the town baked right into this building.

[music] In the archives, we have the repository of every deed from the beginning of this county's birth 1887, up through the 1980s, at which point they became digital.

We'll have some people that will come in and ask, is my house haunted?

And we'll say, yes, you should run very quickly.

No.

[music] And they would show movies here.

It was the biggest space that was available here in Citrus County.

So they would have performers here.

People would come in at night when they weren't meeting with the county commissioners, they would have performances.

And we kind of honor that tradition here by having concerts here and lectures every so often.

We're very community oriented.

It's not just a hands off the artifacts, but we encourage people to come in here and really feel the the atmosphere and the ambiance of the courtroom.

I love how people react when they come in this building.

It has a vibe, and one of the things that we like to point out is that there are indentures in the marble stairs going up, so you can see that people traipsed up those steps for over a hundred years.

[music] We are partnering with Florida Humanities and Smithsonian on a local food history exhibit, and the title name will be Florida Foodways A Taste Through Time.

This is an exhibit that's a collaboration with our community, with items that have been donated and loaned to us to show the history of food in our community.

We've done all kinds of research on what the earliest peoples of Florida were foraging and hunting 14,000 years ago, all the way to different cultures that are more modern to our area, and what the local cuisine is in different areas around Central Florida specifically.

One of my personal favorite items in the local history gallery is our orange sorter.

Children and adults love to come and see what it was like to sort oranges back in the day.

[music] I like to think of the museum as a cultural center.

Personally, I'm an artist.

I do painting and drawing and that type of thing, and I actually teach a lot of craft classes for children.

We actually have adult craft and art classes as well.

We've got an annual tribute to Elvis, and we actually have two Elvis concerts this year.

[music] [music] Back in 1961, we had Elvis come in and he did a movie, "Follow That Dream."

Follow that car!

It's headed for this theater loaded with the most happy go lucky group of wanderers who ever came down the pike chasing after a rainbow.

And the happy go lucky of them all.

Is the one and only Elvis himself.

I've gotta follow that dream.

Wherever that dream may lead.

In the movie, they wanted to have a courthouse to film courtroom scenes because Elvis's character gets into some trouble with the law, and they needed it to be somewhere near a beach as well, because there were beach scenes in the movie.

I've interviewed people that were here when Elvis came to town.

They actually remember interacting with him.

He threw the football with a bunch of kids who would be, you know, older now.

And he did karate chopping outside the courthouse as well of pieces of wood to impress the lady folk I suppose.

It was the biggest thing that happened in town.

There was local investment of some of the local governments into the movie, and it helped just let people know that this town was here.

[music] After the movie ended, you know, we're on the map.

And the powers that be said, let's modernize.

So they modernize the building downstairs and upstairs.

And the building used to look like this, and we switched it over.

[music] Instead of having it being demolished.

They ended up saving the building and we decided to refurbish it.

Resurrected to make it a heritage museum.

This building is very important to keep.

Because it tells the whole history of our county right in one place.

Now the problem was, was the blueprints and the floor plans were gone.

So they had to come up with a way to put this room together when they wanted to restore it.

And the Elvis movie stills is what we did, the way he was shot from the back.

Oh, you know, we'll do the the bench and the railing.

The way he was shot from the front.

Oh, you know, we got the two half moon offices we need to recreate.

And it helped us because if it wasn't for Elvis, we wouldn't be able to put this back the way it is today.

Thank you Elvis, thank you very much.

[music] To learn more about the Old Courthouse Heritage Museum, visit cccourthouse.org.