Travelers starting in the New York City area and making their way across New York State—perhaps to a resort in the Catskills or to Binghamton University—may stop at the Roscoe Diner. It sits on Route 17, one of the main thoroughfares between the city and points westward, and has a reputation extending for miles, in part because you can get some very good French toast there. Otherwise, you are in the middle of nowhere. Roscoe, the town (and it’s not really a town, but a “census designated place”), has only 900 or so residents. The nearby municipality of Agloe has even fewer: no one lives there.
But that’s because it only kind of exists.
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. Sure, you can be creative when it comes to choice of colors, fonts, or line thickness, but the locations of things have to be right or the map won’t be very useful.
As a consequence of this, it’s very easy for a third party to start making maps—the mapmaker simply has 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. Any third party copying their work will also copy the fictional creation unique to the original mapmaker’s product.
According to novelist and YouTube celeb John Green in a TEDx talk, 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. (Green later used Agloe as one of the locations for his novel, Paper Towns, and as the inspiration for its title.) A few decades later, 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 a good and surprising defense:
The county clerk’s office had given them the information.
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, he figured that opportunity had knocked. This lost-to-history fellow probably guessed that others would also come to Agloe—it was on the map, after all!—and 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. As Green notes, at its largest, Agloe had a gas station, the general store, and two houses. Most importantly, Agloe had the attention of the county administrators. They considered Agloe a real place, and therefore, so did Rand McNally’s team of cartographers.
Today, sadly, Agloe is gone. The buildings are abandoned if not destroyed, and the mapmakers of the world no longer recognize its existence.
Orbiting the Earth right now is a satellite called LAGEOS 1, which contains a plaque designed by the late astronomer Carl Sagan. The plaque is effectively a map, showing what the arrangement of the continents looked like when the satellite was placed into orbit. Why include this? LAGEOS 1 is expected to return to Earth in about 8 million years (due to orbital decay), and when it does, the map will tell whomever or whatever discovers it the epoch from which it came.