It’s about a place in upstate New York called Agloe.

In the 1930s, there was no town on that stretch between Rockland and nearby Beaverkill — just a dirt road. Companies that create maps get their work copied all the time. The pirates say, “Prove it” and the pirates get away with it.

Otto G. Lindberg, director of the General Drafting Co., and his assistant, Ernest Alpers were making a road map of New York state, and on that out-of-the-way dirt road, they created a totally fictitious place called “Agloe.” The name was a mix of the first letters in their names, Otto G. Lindberg’s (OGL) and Ernest Alpers’ (EA).

Several years later, map giant Rand McNally issued its own New York state map, and on it – yep, you guessed it – was Agloe.

Lindberg, naturally, sued. But the Rand McNally lawyers had an ace up their sleeve – the designers of the map had gone to the location and found a building there called “The Agloe General Store”.

Uh…what?

The owners had seen Agloe on a map distributed by Esso, which owned scores of gas stations. Esso had bought that map from Lindberg and Alpers.

If Esso says this place is called Agloe, the store folks figured, well, that’s what we’ll call ourselves.

So, a made-up name for a made-up place inadvertently created a real place that, for a time, really existed.

Sadly, the store closed, but the story continues. Lindberg’s company was absorbed into the American Map Company in 1992, and its maps entered into the set of maps that Google itself used. And, as shown on the inset, did indeed show.

Even more sadly, by the time the NPR article came out, Google had corrected the “error”. Spoilsports.

Via NPR.