Agloe, New York is a fictional place that became an actual landmark.

In the 1930s, General Drafting Company founder Otto G. Lindberg and an assistant, Ernest Alpers, assigned an anagram of their initials to a dirt-road intersection in the Catskill Mountains

Catskill Mountains

The Catskill Mountains, an area in New York State northwest of New York City and southwest of Albany, are a mature dissected plateau, an uplifted region that was subsequently eroded into sharp relief. They are an eastward continuation, and the highest representation, of the Allegheny Plateau...

: New York Route 206 and Morton Hill Road, north of Roscoe, New York

Roscoe, New York

Roscoe is a hamlet in Sullivan County, New York, United States. The population was 597 at the 2000 census.Roscoe is in the southwest part of the Town of Rockland, adjacent to New York State Route 17....

. Designed as a copyright trap, the "paper town" published on the General Drafting map then began to appear on Esso

Esso

Esso is an international trade name for ExxonMobil and its related companies. Pronounced , it is derived from the initials of the pre-1911 Standard Oil, and as such became the focus of much litigation and regulatory restriction in the United States. In 1972, it was largely replaced in the U.S. by...

 maps, proving the effectiveness of the trap.

In the 1950s, though, 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

Rand McNally

Rand McNally is an American publisher of maps, atlases, textbooks, and globes for travel, reference, commercial, and educational uses. It also provides online consumer street maps and directions, as well as commercial transportation routing software and mileage data...

 map after the mapmaker got the name of the "town" from the Delaware County

Delaware County, New York

Delaware County is a county located in the U.S. state of New York. As of 2010 the population was 47,980. The county seat is Delhi. It is named after the Delaware River, which was named in honor of Thomas West, 3rd Baron De La Warr, appointed governor of Virginia in 1609.-History:When counties...

 administration. Eventually the store went out of business; Agloe continued to appear on maps as recently as the 1990s, but has now been deleted.

Agloe is featured as an important part of the plot in the novel Paper Towns

Paper Towns

Paper Towns is the third young adult novel by John Green, published in October 2008 by Dutton Books. It debuted at number 5 on the New York Times bestseller list for children's books and was awarded the 2009 Edgar Award for best Young Adult novel....

by John Green.