Last night at church, a friend gave me an old Walt Disney World map and a book called The Story of Walt Disney World. She was in Georgia last week, and these two treasures had caught her eye in an antique store. The asking price for these two pieces combined? Five dollars.

I thanked her, giddy over my very own “new” vintage WDW goodies. We love Disney history, and I’m always excited to read and learn more about the history of the parks in particular. I told our friend that we look on ebay regularly for things like this and wondered out loud just how old they were. As I took a closer look at home, I asked Wes to check some dates for me, noticing that the absence of certain rides indicated that we were looking at early 70s era Disney pieces.

After some research online, we were shocked to discover that what we have are original publications from 1971, the year that Walt Disney World opened. Our confirmation on this was that our book contains a map that details a few hotels that were never even built on WDW property but were in Walt’s original plans. The map itself is identical to the 1971 map sold in the parks, but unlike the reproductions made of it in the years following the opening, it’s the same newspaper texture as the original.

A set of forty-one year old documents doesn’t seem like much of an antique, I know (hey, I was born in the seventies, and I’m not OLD, right?!), but as far as Walt Disney World history goes? These are rare and very, very special.

Just goes to show that one man’s five dollar trash is a Faulk’s treasure, y’all!