Cartographer's Intentional Map Error Discovered 40 Years Later, Credited as Real Town

A fictitious town inserted into a 1985 road atlas as a copyright trap — a deliberate error designed to identify unauthorized copies of the map — has been discovered by researchers to have become a real place after a housing developer used the atlas as a planning reference and built a subdivision where the fake town was marked. The town, labeled 'Argleton' on the original atlas and placed at coordinates corresponding to an empty field in central Minnesota, was one of several intentional errors, known as 'trap streets' or 'paper towns,' that cartographers insert to protect their intellectual property. 'If someone copied our map and included Argleton, we'd know they stole it,' explained retired cartographer Clarence Projection, who created the entry. 'It was supposed to be a little fiction. A canary in the coal mine. I never expected someone to build houses there.' In 2003, developer Marcus Foundation purchased the parcel of land corresponding to the Argleton coordinates and, using the 1985 atlas as a reference, included the name Argleton in his subdivision filing. The county accepted it without question. 'He said on the map it says Argleton, so that's what I called it,' Foundation explained. 'I didn't know it was fake. Why would a map lie?' Argleton now has 47 homes, a homeowners' association, a mailbox cluster, and a listing on Google Maps that Clarence Projection describes as 'the most surreal moment of my cartographic career.' 'I invented a place as a joke in 1985,' Projection said. 'Forty years later, people live there. They have mortgages. They have a neighborhood newsletter called the Argleton Gazette. They're hosting a founders' day celebration next month. The founder is me, and I made the whole thing up.' Projection has been invited to speak at the founders' day celebration. He has accepted, noting that 'this is either the greatest thing I've ever done or the most irresponsible.'