Is it really there?

Today's topic concerns trap streets and even trap towns. No, they're not intended to kill people, just to catch cartographical copycats.

In times past, long before Google Maps (and to be fair Bing Maps) a cartographer had to go and figure out where stuff was, and how far apart the stuff was from other stuff. Naturally this was, and is, both difficult and tedious. Obviously it could also be pretty dangerous. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that many mapmakers simply copied others and passed it off as their own work. Naturally this ticked off the real cartographers to no end so some of them started including imaginary places to catch plagiarists red handed. Otherwise it would be impossible to prove copyright. After all, an accurate map should be identical to another accurate map, right?

Sometimes it could be a fake bend in a river, or a hill that isn't there, but more often it's a street that only exists on the map. If you go there you'll only find a whole heap of nothing.

Kemp Avenue in Toronto, Lye Close in Bristol and Moat Lane in North London are examples of trap streets. But whats really fun is the town of Argleton in northern England. Argleton has never existed at all. Today it has been removed from Google Maps, but for a long time it appeared on many different maps. In reality there is and has always been only a muddy field there.

Even more fascinating is the town of Agloe in upstate New York. Agloe was first put on the map in the 1930's by cartographer Otto G. Lindberg and his assistant Ernest Alpers. They included Agloe for the reasons mentioned above. Then one day Lindberg saw Agloe on a Rand McNally map, and promptly cried foul.

The kicker is Agloe was really there, or at least a building with a large sign saying Agloe General Store. So the McNally mapmakers naturally included the town of Agloe on their version of the map.

What had happened was this: The store owners had bought a map from gas giant Esso, Lindbergs map in fact, and seeing that the map claimed the place where they built their store was called Agloe, it would be natural to name their store the Agloe General Store. After all, an official map bought from Esso had to be correct.

That's it for today, until next time, have a great week!