It Appears That Copyrighting Maps,

is not as easy as you might think,

so welcome to the history of Agloe, New York, the town that never was, that became a town and now is sort of not again, if two companies make a map of the same area, but do so independent of each other, the maps should have some identical data, towns and roads and bodies of water need to be represented accurately or drivers and others using the maps to navigate their surroundings will certainly get lost,


as a consequence of this, it’s very easy for a third party to start making maps, they simply have to copy the data from any other reliable map and reproduce it, to some degree, copyright law should prevent this, but outright copying isn’t so easy to prove, as a solution, some mapmakers add fake streets (called “trap streets”) or even fake towns (often called “paper towns”) into their maps, if someone came by and copied their work, they’d also copy the fictional creation unique to the original map maker’s craft,


and so Agloe was born, the General Drafting Company in 1937 did just this with the town of Agloe, creating it out of thin air at the intersection of two dirt roads just a few miles from Roscoe, all went well for a few decades, then Agloe appeared again, but this time in a map made by a different, unrelated company, Rand McNally, General Drafting thought they had caught Rand McNally red-handed, but Rand McNally had an incredibly good and surprising defence, the county clerk’s office had given them the information!


now here is the neat bit, it turns out that, in the early part of the 1950s, someone armed with the General Drafting map went to visit Agloe, seeing nothing there, they figured that opportunity had knocked, this lost-to-history fellow, likely figuring that others would also come to Agloe, would expect to find something there, so he opened a small shop and called it the 'Agloe General Store.' over the next forty years, the fictional town of Agloe grew, it had a gas station, the general store, and two houses, sadly today the buildings are abandoned if not destroyed, and the mapmakers of the world no longer recognise its existence, Agloe, the town that never was, that became a town and now is sort of not again.