Top: Screenshot of the former Agloe General Store, from a video by YouTube user and John Green fan ObviouslyBenHughes, who visited Agloe in 2010. Above: The full video.
A Catskills town called Agloe is famous this week for the fact that it doesn't exist.
The hamlet of Agloe, an imaginary place located at an rural empty intersection in Delaware County, was made up in 1937 by two mapmakers as a "copyright trap" designed to unmask competiting mapmakers who couldn't bother to do their own cartography research.
Agloe's exact location is at the intersection of Route 206 and Morton Hill Road (some say it's Beaver Kill Road) just north of Roscoe over the line in the Delaware County town of Colchester.
The fake town appeared on maps handed out for free at Esso stations, according to its Wikipedia page. When a general store was built at the intersection, it named itself the Agloe General Store after the name on the Esso map.
Rand-McNally, working from county records, put the Algoe store, and Agloe, on its own maps. Voila, Agloe was real -- you could even find it in Google Maps.
Not only is it real, it's a tourist attraction, at least for teenagers who read young adult fiction. John Green uses Agloe as a major plot device in his novel Paper Towns, published in 2008. ("This is a completely irresistible metaphor to a novelist," Green said in 2012.) Since the book came out, teenage Green fans have been hunting for Algoe -- and in some cases, finding it.
Photos and vidoes of Agloe, and the ruins of the old general store there, abound on Tumblr and Youtube. One girl, featured in the video below, dragged her parents on a search for Algoe that involved several nearby town historians and culminated in a triumphant guitar solo.
The non-existent Agloe General Store even has its own Facebook page, with photo, address and phone number, likely made by fans of Green's book. (No one answered at the phone number when the Watershed Post called.)
People have known about the non-existence of Agloe for over a decade, according to article citations on the town's Wikipedia page. It's "famous among cartographers," according to John Green in this TEDx talk from 2012.
But last week, the story arose again on a blog post by Frank Jacobs of Strange Maps, who pointed out that Google was still listing the imaginary location:
Turn to Google Maps, and type in Agloe: an arrow still lands in the spot where Messrs. Lindberg and Alpers placed it, long after the general store there has gone. And long after the General Drafting Company itself has gone. Once one of the 'Big Three' in road map publishing, the company was absorbed into the American Map Company in 1992 and its state maps amalgamated with that company's catalogue. Ironically, its only lasting legacy is that intentional, sneaky, but ultimately self-perpetuating mistake – Agloe.
This week, NPR reporter Robert Krulwich noticed that Google had removed Agloe, presumably because of Jacob's blog post:
So, as of last week, when I wrote this post, Google was perpetuating an 80-year-old fantasy that for a short time turned real, then unreal. But then, just as this story was to be published, to be extra sure, we went to Google Earth, typed in "Agloe" one last time, and, whaddya know? It isn't there any more!
A reporter for the U.K.-based Telegraph wrote a story about Agloe this week, and took the time to interview a few Catskills locals:
“They put it there as a copyright trap,” said Kay Parisi-Hampel, the historian of Colchester Township, where Agloe is supposed to have been. “People saw it on the map which was produced for gas stations and they decided that the place existed.” ...
Today, most locals are blissfully unaware of Agloe’s existence. “I have never heard of it,” said Jim Eisel, chairman of Delaware County, New York[.]
Imaginary towns that become real because people visit them, talk about them, and love them. Sounds just like the Catskills.
Below: Watch a John Green fan who found her way to Agloe, below.
