Agloe, New York

Agloe

Delaware County, New York

The crossroads, photographed towards the site. There is no marker, because there is nothing to mark. Whether it is the right crossroads depends on the year: the accounts give Morton Hill and the map now gives the Beaverkill, and the same photograph would serve for either.

Type	Copyright trap
Invented	The 1920s, or the 1930s[2]
By	Otto G. Lindberg and Ernest Alpers
For	The General Drafting Company
Named after	Their initials, rearranged
Purpose	To be stolen
The place
Location	An empty crossroads north of Roscoe
Buildings ever documented	One, and only on a postcard
Population, at its height	Not recorded, and not zero either
Unlonnture index	Undefined; there is no denominator
Standing
Entered by the USGS	February 2014, as Agloe (Not Official)[6]
Removed by Google	March 2014
Reason for removal	It had become well known

Agloe is a fictitious settlement in Delaware County, New York, invented in order to be stolen. It is the deliberate case; the Mountains of Kong are the accidental one. It was placed at an empty crossroads north of Roscoe, in the Catskills, by the General Drafting Company, as a copyright trap: a fictitious entry planted in a map so that its later appearance on a rival's map would show the rival had copied rather than surveyed.^[1]

It is the most celebrated of such traps, because it is said to have got away. The account repeated wherever the subject comes up is that a shop was built at the crossroads because the map said there was a place there, so that by the time the trap was sprung the fiction had become a fact and there was nothing left to complain of. The evidence for that account is thinner than the account, and is set out below.

What a copyright trap is for

A map is a great deal of work and almost none of it can be owned, which is an awkward position for cartography to be in. The position of a river is a fact, and facts are not copyrightable; so a mapmaker who finds his rival's sheet agreeing with his own in every particular has proved nothing except that both of them measured the same country.

The method depends on the exception. A mapmaker cannot own the position of a river. He can own a river that is not there. Plant one, wait, and any sheet that carries it was copied from yours, because there was nowhere else for it to come from.^[1]

The traps go by several names, all of them careful: fictitious entries, paper towns, trap streets. What they have in common is that the mapmaker's proof of his own honesty is a thing he made up.

The name

The letters are the initials of the two men who invented it. Otto G. Lindberg, who founded the General Drafting Company, and his assistant Ernest Alpers, arranged the letters O, G, L, E and A into AGLOE.^[2]

This is the only part of the whole affair that every source agrees on.

General Drafting drew the road maps that Esso gave away at filling stations, which is how a crossroads with nothing on it came to be printed several million times.

The crossroads

Agloe sits, or does not, at the meeting of New York 206 and Morton Hill Road, a few miles north of Roscoe.^[3] Some accounts put it instead at the Beaverkill road, and some put its invention in the 1920s and others in the 1930s. The dating has never been settled. The crossroads has, in a manner of speaking, settled itself, and the reader is asked to hold the question open until the last section of this article.

The story that is told

Some years later Agloe appeared on a map published by Rand McNally, and General Drafting went to them about it.

Rand McNally's answer was that the name had not been taken off anybody's map. It had come from the records of Delaware County, which held it because a business at that crossroads had registered itself as the Agloe General Store – having taken its name from the Esso map, which was the only authority anyone had for the crossroads being a place at all.

So the trap sprang and closed on nothing. Between the planting and the finding, the fiction had gone and made itself true, and the proof of theft had become a proof of the opposite.^[4]

It is a very good story. It is told in books about maps, in a novel, and in a film, and this encyclopedia would be glad of it.

What can actually be shown

The Colchester Historical Society, whose parish this is, went through its files. It found no Agloe General Store. It found a postcard, labelled Agloe Lodge on the Beaverkill.^[5]

Residents of long standing say there was never a store at the crossroads. What there was, from 1930, was a fishing lodge: Agloe Lodge Farms was incorporated in that year, took over an existing lodge, and renamed it after the map, in the same act of reading and believing that the story attributes to the shopkeeper. The land is said to have changed hands for a dollar.

None of this shows the story to be false. It shows that the part everyone repeats is the part nobody has evidenced, and that the one surviving object is a postcard of a fishing lodge named after a place that was not there. The account of how a fiction became a fact is itself, at present, a fiction with a fact attached.

Which is what a copyright trap is: an invention put into circulation to see who would carry it, and a way of finding out afterwards who had been copying whom.

Removal

Agloe went on appearing. It was on maps into the 1990s and it was on Google Maps for years after that.

In February 2014 the United States Geological Survey entered it in the Geographic Names Information System as Agloe (Not Official), a form of words in which a government body records the existence of a thing's non-existence.^[6] The following month Google deleted it, journalists having begun to write about its being there.^[7]

It was therefore taken off the map because it had become well known for being on the map, which is the mechanism that put it there running backwards.

It is still on the map

Google removed Agloe. OpenStreetMap did not. It is carried there to this day as a locality, in the town of Colchester, Delaware County, and can be looked up in a moment by anybody wishing to see a settlement that was invented in order to be stolen.^[8]

It has also moved. The published accounts, and the map as it stood a few years ago, put Agloe at the Morton Hill junction. The position now given for it is on Beaver Kill Road.

The disagreement recorded above about which crossroads Agloe stands at is therefore not a disagreement, and this encyclopedia withdraws the suggestion that it might be. Both roads are correct, at different times. A place invented at a crossroads it was not at has since declined to stay at the crossroads it was not at.

The trade has since learned to put its invented places where nobody will mistake them for real ones. Null Island, at 0°N 0°E, is a one-square-metre island entered in a public dataset expressly so that data which has failed to be located anywhere will pile up somewhere an editor can see it: the same fiction as Agloe, aimed at the opposite result.

See also

• Mountweazel – the same trap in books, which proves copying and, in court, very little else
• Cartography – the discipline that invented this place and could not afterwards get rid of it
• Unlonnture index – which divides what a thing insists on by where it actually is; Agloe has no denominator at all
• Reuelsee – a lake that is never quite where it is, which is at least a lake
• Babylonian Map of the World – another map with places on it that nobody has since located
• Stigler's law of eponymy – the rule Agloe breaks, being named for the men who actually made it
• The Mountains of Kong – the same copying, with nobody setting the trap

References

1. ^ The trap works because a map's contents are largely facts and facts attract no copyright, so identical correct entries prove nothing. A deliberate error is the mapmaker's own creation and can be owned, which makes it the only part of the sheet that can be shown to have been copied.
2. ^ Otto G. Lindberg founded the General Drafting Company; Ernest Alpers was his assistant. Sources place the invention in the 1920s and in the 1930s with about equal confidence and no argument between them.
3. ^ New York 206 at Morton Hill Road, north of Roscoe, Delaware County. Accounts naming the Beaverkill road instead are common enough to be worth recording, and turn out not to be errors at all; see the last section.
4. ^ The exchange with Rand McNally is reported everywhere as a lawsuit that collapsed. No suit is documented. What is documented is that General Drafting raised the matter and that Rand McNally answered by pointing at the county records, which is a duller event and the one that actually happened.
5. ^ The Colchester Historical Society's own account: having searched its files it reports a copy of an old postcard labelled Agloe Lodge on the Beaverkill, and nothing at all about a general store. Agloe Lodge Farms was incorporated in 1930.
6. ^ The Geographic Names Information System is the United States' official register of place names. Agloe was entered in February 2014 with the parenthesis (Not Official) attached to it, so that the register now recorded the name without conceding the place.
7. ^ Removed in March 2014. Agloe had by then been the subject of a novel, Paper Towns (2008), and of a good deal of journalism about its survival on Google's maps, which is what drew the attention that ended it. The film followed in 2015.
8. ^ Confirmed against OpenStreetMap directly: a locality named Agloe is returned at 41.9679°N, 74.8997°W, which reverse-geocodes to Beaver Kill Road, Town of Colchester, Delaware County. The move is recorded on the Wikimedia Commons rendering of the 2019 map state, whose description notes that Agloe has since shifted east to the Beaver Kill Road junction. No distance is asserted here: the file's description gives half a mile, and the points it is measured between are not stated.

External links

• Agloe – the Colchester Historical Society, which went through its own files and reports what it found and did not find
• Agloe, New York – general reference, and the source of the dating disagreement recorded above