This Guy Purchased A Tank On Ebay, But Didn’t Know It Contained A Fortune

An Original Copy

While the man had no idea if the copy was legitimate or simply looked to be old, it certainly seemed like a noteworthy find. He showed the document to a friend who was a collector of Civil War memorabilia who urged him to have it appraised. After the man did this, he was stunned at the results of the appraisal which uncovered the document was a Dunlap broadside. A Dunlap is an extremely rare document that is one of the first five hundred official copies from the very first printing of the Declaration of the Independence that was printed in 1776. Before this finding, there were only twenty-three similar copies and only two of them were owned by private owners. The Philadelphia man definitely got more than he bargained for with this find. The document was later auctioned off by Sotheby’s for $2.42 million. Years later the TV producer Norman Lear bought the document for $8.14 million.