Say hello to Agloe, New York, a city that didn’t exist, then it did, and…then it didn’t again.
The small town (which would be around 2.5 hours from NYC) is what they call a “paper town” —a place that began as a fictional entry on a map but briefly became real.
Let’s break down how the story goes.
Back in the 1920s, two men from the mapmaking company General Drafting Company, named Otto G. Lindberg and his assistant Ernest Alpers, created a fake city in Delaware County, New York.
The city was an anagram of their two names and they placed it at a remote intersection on their maps as a copyright trap.
In those days of physical maps, if “Agloe, New York” appeared on a competitor’s map…it was obvious that they were plagiarizing General Drafting Co.’s maps. These copyright traps became commonplace during this time period when companies would try all sorts of tricks to throw off other cartographers.
Fast forward a decade to the 1930s when the story takes a turn, and a company named Agloe Lodge Farms was officially registered as a business entity in the region, alongside a general store named Agloe General Store.
According to the Times Herald-Record, members of the Nead family sold the land that would be Agloe, NY for $1, that they suspected was actually a front for rival mapmaker, Rand McNally.
Nonetheless, whoever owned the store had seen Agloe on a map and decided to use the name, inadvertently turning the fictional town into a real, if tiny, landmark.
Agloe continued to appear on maps for decades, even after the store closed and the area was abandoned in the 1990s.
It became a quirky symbol of the blurred line between fiction and reality, and was later popularized in John Green’s novel Paper Towns and its film adaptation.
However, Agloe is no longer an official place today and you won’t be able to find it on a map (or Google Maps for that matter), but its quirky cartography story remains as one of the country’s great folk stories.