Vintage Map of Florida | History and Romance Pictorial Print

Look at Orlando on this map. It's a dot with a cow standing next to it.

In 1951 the places people drove to see were Cypress Gardens, Silver Springs, and the divers at Weekiwachee. Cape Canaveral was a stretch of beach with a rocket sketched over it. Webb's City in St. Petersburg is on here too, labeled the World's Most Unusual Drug Store, which is what it called itself. For a lot of people this is the Florida they actually remember, and most of it is gone.

Drawn by a man from Sebring

The artist was Dave Mink, and he titled it a pictorial chart of romantic Florida depicting its exotic wildlife, its tropical splendors of land and sea; its historic past; its vital and exciting present. Sebring sits on the map a little south of Lake Wales. He was drawing his own state, and it shows.

Nearly every town is hand lettered, and most of them come with a picture. Cigars at Tampa. A diver at Weekiwachee Springs. Citrus and grapes through the middle of the state. A steamboat on the Kissimmee, a sailfish off the Atlantic coast, and a Spanish galleon marking De Soto's landing in 1539. Iron Mountain is marked as the highest point in Florida at 325 feet, which tells you something about Florida.

The border is a second map

Along the top and bottom, scenes from the state's history run in panels. Down both sides are the animals: pelicans, a flamingo, an alligator, a manatee, a deer, and a long column of Florida game fish, each one named. You can spend a while on the border without ever getting to the middle.

The print

• Restored by KNOWOL from the 1951 original
• Museum quality archival matte paper, archival inks
• 16" x 20", landscape
• In stock and ready to ship, not printed to order
• Framed in black or white available above

It's the kind of map people stand in front of. Someone always finds the town they grew up in.

Read more about Dave Mink's 1951 chart of Florida