Earlier in the year, I revealed to Top Comments my love for maps. Well, here's something cool and map-related that has been sitting in my "Diary Ideas" document for quite some time now. Ever been to Agloe, New York? I'm guessing not, since it...doesn't really exist. Or does it? No, it definitely doesn't. Follow me below the bald-faced-lying map...
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If you found a map with Agloe on it and drove to its location in upstate New York, you wouldn't find much--it consists of the intersection of NY 206 and an unnamed rural road. There are no streets, no houses, and certainly no population. The "town" has never truly existed on anything but paper. So, if Agloe doesn't exist, then why the hell is it on a road atlas?
Well, it all starts with plagiarism. If you've ever wondered if copying occurs in the cartographic industry, the short answer is that it does. As you might imagine, combating the plagiarism of maps purportedly depicting real roads and town locations is a tricky business. How does one prove a mapmaker copied another mapmaker's work, especially as precision in cartography has only improved? This is where the fictitious town of Agloe came in.
Mapmakers had been wrestling with this issue for centuries, but the problem had grown more acute as cartographic precision increased: How do you prove someone stole your map, if that map accurately reflects reality? The answer: add fantasy! Mapmakers had been able to take their competitors to court by pointing out fake places (a.k.a. paper towns) on their maps that were copied from their original work! For this reason, fictitious roads are often called trap streets: because they entrap the company copying them onto their own maps.
Of course, the mapmaker won't invent busy thoroughfares or large towns. Not only would this be more easily discovered by the competition, it would also confuse the unsuspecting map-reader. Better to use tiny dead-end streets for these phony map entries, or small, out-of-the-way hamlets. Like Agloe.
In short, Agloe was a trap. Sometime in the 1930s, General Drafting Company planted the town (which was named using a mix of the first letters of the company's director's and his assistant's names:
Otto
G.
Lindberg and
Ernest
Alpers) on its New York map to catch map plagiarists should they pop up. And pop up they did. In fact, the first accused plagiarist was a name you might recognize: Rand McNally, one of General Drafting Company's main competitors. Sure enough, Rand McNally put out a New York map depicting Agloe. They'd fallen right into the trap. Open-and-shut case of plagiarism, right?
Well, that's what General Drafting Company thought, but things got a bit complicated with this "town" in the Catskills. Rand McNally offered a startling (and apparently convincing) defense: Agloe actually existed and even had a general store!
Rand McNally told the court that its designers went to the official map of that county, looked up the coordinates, and on the spot called Agloe they found a building, and that building, they told the judge, is the Agloe General Store. So there is an Agloe. Otherwise, where'd the owners get the name?
Good question. Here's the ironic answer. The owners had seen Agloe on a map distributed by Esso, which owned scores of gas stations. Esso had bought that map from Lindberg and Alpers. If Esso says this place is called Agloe, the store folks figured, well, that's what we'll call ourselves. So, a made-up name for a made-up place inadvertently created a real place that, for a time, really existed. Rand McNally, one presumes, was found not guilty.
Weird, huh?
The store soon closed, once again leaving a rather isolated stretch of road. But Agloe continued to "exist" on paper for 80 years and, until this year, was even marked on Google Maps.
But Agloe has now been removed by Google (shortly after the blog I linked above was published). If you use Google Street View its original location now, you'll find a beautiful (but fairly uninhabited) stretch of road. Still no town, no Agloe, no trace. And thus ends the story of Agloe...?
I like NPR's Robert Krulwich's ending to the story, so I'll let him finish this diary:
...you are now attending an instant online funeral for a town that never was, then was, then wasn't and now isn't. So, I ask you to stand silently, think of the late Otto Lindberg and the late Ernest Alpers, who gave their initials so that Agloe might be; think of the proprietors of the Agloe General Store, and of the Somebody at Google, who, apparently, reads Frank Jacobs' blog, Strange Maps, and reacts faster than I do. Damn that Google guy. And let us say ... Amen.
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July 17, 2014
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