The Paper Town That Became Real: Agloe, New York and the Cartographer's Trap

In the 1920s, mapmakers Otto G. Lindberg and Ernest Alpers, commissioned by the gas-station chain Esso, fabricated a fictional hamlet called Agloe in upstate New York. This 'paper town' was a copyright trap designed to catch plagiarists: if a rival map contained the same invented place, it proved they had copied. The name Agloe, however, took on a life of its own when a business named Agloe Lodge Farms appeared in 1930 and later applied the name to a fishing lodge. This gave Agloe a legal existence, as Rand McNally could cite official county records when challenged. NPR's Robert Krulwich noted in 2014 that the name had become a real place for a time, but by then it had disappeared from Google Earth. The story was popularized by John Green, who titled his novel 'Paper Towns' after such phenomena, and discussed it in a Vlogbrothers episode with his brother Hank. The article also references related content on mapmaking history and fictional maps.