Agloe

Colchester’s Town of Agloe-The Paper Town that Became Real

According to the Museum of Hoaxes, “The town of Agloe, New York was a “copyright trap” placed on Esso Maps during the 1930’s. (That is a nonexistent town whose purpose was to reveal if rival mapmakers were blindly copying the information on Esso maps.) The name was a scramble of the initials of Otto G. Lindberg (the company founder) and his assistant Ernest Alpers. They located the town at a dirt-road (Morton Hill) intersection north of Roscoe, New York.  So, when the town of Agloe later appeared on a Rand McNally map, Esso accused Rand McNally of copying their map. But it turned out that Rand McNally was innocent. The town of Agloe actually had been registered with the Delaware County administration, because someone had wanted to build a general store at that dirt Intersection and had named it the Agloe General Store, thus bringing the town into existence.  In 2012, Tim Duerden, Delaware County Historical Association director, contacted us about Agloe, after receiving an email from a Scottish writer who was researching fictitious entries publishers insert into maps, for a magazine article. After digging through our files, we did find a copy of an old postcard labeled Agloe Lodge on the Beaverkill, but nothing about the Agloe General Store. A coming-of-age mystery book by John Green titled Paper Towns, uses Agloe as a setting in the book and this has created an internet following where people are traveling to our area in search of Agloe and blogging about their adventures.  Another recent title using Agloe as the setting is The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd.  This novel centers around a group of academic cartographers working on a post-graduate project but finding an old gas station map leads to a discovery of a town that will have a chilling impact on the group from then on.

Lillian Browne wrote an update piece on Agloe for my September 2014 Colchester History Connections Newsletter and the London Telegraph ran a story in March 2014 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10712728/Putting-Agloe-on-the-map-the-tale-of-a-town-that-never-was.html

For those following the Colchester tales of Agloe another article appeared to add to your collection from John DeSanto, a freelance journalist with the Middletown Times Herald-Record:  http://www.recordonline.com/news/20161030/845-life-strange-story-of-agloe-ny