Agloe, New York

Agloe
Fictional Agloe, New York, a copyright trap, shown on a real map of New York published by Exxon in 1998.
A General Drafting map location
Country	United States
Created by	Otto G. Lindberg and Ernest Alpers
Genre	Map
Type	Hamlet, copyright trap
Notable locations	Agloe General Store (formerly)
First appearance	c. 1930
State	New York
County	Delaware County, New York
Town	Colchester, New York
ZIP code	12776

Agloe is a fictional hamlet in Colchester, Delaware County, New York, that became an actual landmark after mapmakers made up the community as a "copyright trap".

In the 1930s, General Drafting founder Otto G. Lindberg and an assistant, Ernest Alpers, assigned an anagram of their initials to a dirt-road intersection in the Catskill Mountains: NY 206 and Morton Hill Road, north of Roscoe, New York. The town was designed as a "copyright trap" to be able to catch others who might copy their maps.

In the 1950s, a general store was built at the intersection on the map, and was given the name Agloe General Store because the name was on the Esso maps. Later, Agloe appeared on a Rand McNally map after the mapmaker got the name of the "hamlet" from the Delaware County administration. When Esso threatened to sue Rand McNally for the assumed copyright infringement which the "trap" had revealed, the latter pointed out that the place had now become real and therefore no infringement could be established.

Eventually the store went out of business; Agloe continued to appear on maps as recently as the 1990s, but has now been deleted. It briefly appeared on Google Maps. The United States Geological Survey added "Agloe (Not Official)" to the Geographic Names Information System database on February 25, 2014.