What is a Paper Town ?

A paper town is essentially a copyright trap.

Map making is a tedious and difficult job. So there has always been plagiarism in the map-making industry.

So,to avoid this cartographers came up with a master-plan-Paper towns.

For example A is map-making company,so A will mention a made-up town’s name in their map,if B Map-making company trys to copy from A company,they’d be caught because the town doesn’t exist.

Over the years there have been many paper towns,Argleton,Agloe,moat lane etc.

But a very interesting thing happened with one of the paper town-it became a real town.

The town was Agloe.

Agloe is situated in Roscoe,New York

Agloe the invention of Lindberg and his assistant, Ernest Alpers; its very name was a mix of their initials (OGL and EA).They sold their maps to Esso company.

But then agloe featured in the maps of another company called Rand mcNally.

Esso thought Rand mcNally had fallen into their trap and sued them for plagiarism.But the Rand mcNally said that agloe was actually a real town.

How did that happen?

Actually in late 1950s the locals of Roscoe opened a general store and named it ‘THE AGLOE GENERAL STORE’,since the they saw the place marked as Agloe in the Esso maps.

Thus Agloe became a real town.

Eventually, the store ran out of business. Agloe was last seen in Google maps in 1990s,but now it has been deleted.