Last week, a reporter for The New York Times noticed a mention on Twitter about fake towns, which mapmakers would invent to guard against copyright infringement. An Internet search turned up Agloe and the Google map, complete with the driving directions. Agloe was a mapmaker’s creation.

“It wasn’t uncommon for cartographers to put something fictitious so if they spotted another work with it they knew it was lifted,” said William Spicer, the president of Maps.com.

Among those countless copyright traps, Agloe achieved a rare distinction: The name stuck. As early as the 1930s, a fishing lodge named Agloe opened nearby (which later helped Rand McNally successfully claim in a lawsuit that the Agloe on its own map had not been copied from Socony’s).

Agloe survived on road maps by Esso and Exxon into the late 20th century and even long enough to evolve from a so-called paper town into a digital one on websites like Google, where it made its debut only last year.

Image A 1948 map with Agloe, N.Y. The town in the western Catskills of New York wound up on maps 90 years ago, but visitors will no longer find it on a Google map - or at all. Credit... William P. O'Donnell/The New York Times

It was even mentioned in a 1957 travelogue in The Times about “scenic drives through the Catskills,” which rhapsodized about “an unmarked country road that goes north through Rockland and Agloe.”