Agloe, the Catskills Town That Doesn’t Exist
A Catskills town called Agloe is famous this week for the fact that it doesn’t exist.
The hamlet of Agloe, an imaginary place located at an rural empty intersection in Delaware County, was made up in 1937 by two mapmakers as a “copyright trap” designed to unmask competiting mapmakers who couldn’t bother to do their own cartography research.
Agloe’s exact location is at the intersection of Route 206 and Morton Hill Road (some say it’s Beaver Kill Road) just north of Roscoe over the line in the Delaware County town of Colchester.
The fake town appeared on maps handed out for free at Esso stations, according to its Wikipedia page. When a general store was built at the intersection, it named itself the Agloe General Store after the name on the Esso map.