"Agloe, the Paper Town Stronger than Fiction" Topic

"Truth is stranger than fiction. Especially if that truth is caused by fiction. Consider the strange case of Agloe, a place name that started appearing on maps of New York State in the 1930s.

An insignificant little fleck, Agloe was shown somewhere in the Catskills, at the junction of an unnamed country road with NY 206, just about where that state route crosses Beaver Kill. Both the stream and the route are tributaries of larger arteries: just to the south in Roscoe, they meet the Willowemoc Creek and New York State Route 17, respectively.

But Agloe was fake – a deliberate fake. The toponym was scrambled from the initials of Otto G. Lindberg, the director of the General Drafting Company, and his assistant Ernest Alpers. The mapmaking company was putting together a road map of New York State, and wanted to make sure that all its hard work wouldn't just be copied over by its competitors…"

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Amicalement
Armand

As a side note, encyclopedias used to do the same thing, create false entries about a small insignificant town, or country, so they could catch companies that were copying their work.

Fred Saberhagen wrote a Bezerker short story based on that practice.

Thanks for the info my friend.

Amicalement
Armand