Agloe, The Fake Town

For my blog post I read one of the many articles listed in Wikipedia as "unusual." I had a hard time choosing just one article to read because I thought the majority of them sounded fairly entertaining. After browsing the long list of strange and unusual topics I finally picked one about a town in New York called Agloe.

The article goes into a brief history of the town and how it was actually designed as a copyright trap. For those of you who don’t know, a copyright is a specific case where the motivation for the entry is to detect plagiarism or copyright infringement. In laments terms, a copyright trap is just a made up place that the government makes up on a map, but in reality it’s not actually a real place.

In the early 1930’s there was a General Drafting Company founded by Otto G. Lindberg and his assistant, Ernest Alpers who assigned an anagram of their initials onto a dirt road intersection in the Catskill Mountains, which happened to be “Agloe.” Twenty years after the two men wrote their initials onto that intersection a general store was built there, and was named Agloe General Store because of the name on the map. After a few years of the store having a decent business, the name “Agloe” appeared on a newer map by Randy McNally. The old map company then threatened to sue McNally for assumed copyright infringement which the “trap town” had revealed, but due to the general store being named Agloe it was now a real place and the infringement could not be established. The general store eventually went out of business but Agloe appeared on maps as recent as the late 1990s but it has since been deleted. It alsp appeared on Google Maps until as recently as 2014. Since then the United States Geological Survey added Agloe to the Geographic Names Information System to inform others of the mysterious town that is Agloe.

I found this article very interesting because I have actually heard of it before through John Green’s book Paper Towns. Although the book doesn’t go into much detail about the town, it brushes up on it not actually being a real place. I liked reading this article and learning more background as to how mix ups like this can possibly happen, as well as how people fix these kinds of issues. I feel as if this information is very useful because it prevents problems like this ever happening again somewhere else in the years to come. I believe Agloe earned its own Wikipedia page for that exact reason, to inform people who may have never heard of it of the situation, and because it is such an interesting topic. I myself have never heard of anything else like this happening before and I’m sure I’m not the only one, which is why it was so interesting for me to read. Other people just like myself may have heard of it before but don’t really know much about it and want to know more, which is why I think it’s good it be publicly published like it has. I don’t think Wikipedia is the best outlet for the article to be published on though. I myself am not personally a fan of Wikipedia because I have heard so often before how easy it is for others to go in and edit or add things to any page they want. With an article like this especially, the facts are the most important. Posting the article on a different sight that doesn’t have this type of issue could help the article’s credibility to other readers. I would recommend it being in a historical magazine or something more along those lines or maybe expanding more on Algoe and having its own book for others to learn about. Until this happens though I think it is very useful for this information to be on Wikipedia.