Why Mapmakers Put Fake Towns on Their Maps in the 1920s — and the One That Became Real

Open Cul­ture read­ers may know John Green best for Crash Course, the YouTube chan­nel that teach­es every­thing you need to know about sub­jects like world his­to­ry, U.S. his­to­ry, big his­to­ry, lit­er­a­ture, and phi­los­o­phy. Or at least it teach­es every­thing a teenage stu­dent fac­ing down the prospect of Advanced Place­ment sub­ject exams needs to know. Such view­ers have always had a decent chance of know­ing Green as the author of nov­els for young read­ers like Look­ing for Alas­ka, The Fault in Our Stars, and Paper Towns. That last takes its title from just the kind of his­tor­i­cal phe­nom­e­non that would in any case have fas­ci­nat­ed Green, in his capac­i­ty as a vlog­ger, enough to inspire a video: the whol­ly fic­tion­al set­tle­ments cre­at­ed by map­mak­ers in order to expose car­to­graph­ic pla­gia­rists.

Green dis­cuss­es one such paper town in the episode of Vlog­broth­ers, the long-run­ning chan­nel Green runs with his broth­er Hank, at the top of the post. Agloe, New York, an upstate ham­let in Colch­ester, Delaware Coun­ty, was fab­ri­cat­ed in the nine­teen-twen­ties by car­tog­ra­ph­er Otto G. Lind­berg and his assis­tant Ernest Alpers, who’d been com­mis­sioned to make maps for the gas-sta­tion chain Esso.

Map­mak­ers (like Lind­berg and Alpers) have guard­ed against pla­gia­rism by insert­ing “paper towns” — invent­ed streets, land­marks, or oth­er fea­tures — into their maps. The log­ic is sim­ple: two car­tog­ra­phers might eas­i­ly draw the same real town, but two car­tog­ra­phers can’t inde­pen­dent­ly dream up the same fake one. So if a rival’s map con­tains the same invent­ed place, it all but proves they copied the map.

Though intend­ed as noth­ing more than a “copy­right trap,” the name of the dot in the road, Agloe, soon man­i­fest­ed in the real world. A busi­ness named Agloe Lodge Farms appeared in 1930, and it went on to apply the name to a local fish­ing lodge it acquired. Thus was Agloe, New York brought into exis­tence, at least in the eyes of the law: by the time they were chal­lenged about its inclu­sion on their own maps, Rand McNal­ly could cite offi­cial coun­ty records in their defense.

In oth­er words, “a made-up name for a made-up place inad­ver­tent­ly cre­at­ed a real place that, for a time, real­ly exist­ed,” writes NPR’s Robert Krul­wich. “Rand McNal­ly, one pre­sumes, was found not guilty. Then the store closed. It isn’t there any­more. Decades passed.” At the time Krul­wich was writ­ing, in 2014, an inter­net search for Agloe, New York would still return a point where Lind­berg and Alpers had orig­i­nal­ly placed it on their map the bet­ter part of a cen­tu­ry ear­li­er. “But then, just as this sto­ry was to be pub­lished, to be extra sure, we went to Google Earth, typed in ‘Agloe’ one last time, and, whad­dya know? It isn’t there any more!” Ado­les­cent read­ers imag­in­ing them­selves run­ning away in the man­ner of Mar­go Spiegel­man will have to seek out anoth­er far­away paper town to dream about — or, more like­ly these days, a pix­el town.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

William Faulkn­er Draws Maps of Yok­na­p­ataw­pha Coun­ty, the Fic­tion­al Home of His Great Nov­els

The Biggest Mis­takes in Map­mak­ing His­to­ry

The Medieval City Plan Gen­er­a­tor: A Fun Way to Cre­ate Your Own Imag­i­nary Medieval Cities

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, the “Most Ambi­tious Overview of Map Mak­ing Ever,” Is Free Online

The French Designed a Fake Repli­ca of Paris to Fool Ger­man Bombers Dur­ing World War I

John Green’s Crash Course in U.S. His­to­ry: From Colo­nial­ism to Oba­ma in 47 Videos

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.