For many of us, poring over maps and aerial photos generates a latent energy that emerges from the prospect of going on an adventure to the actual place. Or maybe we’ve been there, and like soaring birds our eyes now gaze upon these two-dimensional representations of reality. In a way, we watch ourselves, retracing our movements, rekindling our experiences, or again, dreaming of what it would like to go there for the first time. With maps, we tend to trust the information we absorb but harbor a dash of suspicion, lest we be misled. We might even be on the lookout for quirks that inevitably pop up now and again.
By now, many map readers have noticed that Slide Mountain is labeled Shoe Mountain on some online maps. From the feedback I’ve gathered, speculation as to the origin of this misnomer range from a copying mistake to a joke to the mountain looking like a shoe. The first item seems most likely as the two words are similar. And nowadays, with so much occupying the computerized realm, we can see the likelihood of a runaway typo. But however such a mistake winds up on a map, it surely gets copied repeatedly, sometimes to the point of anchoring itself more firmly in reality. Though the Shoe Mountain label currently has no chance of ousting Slide, and likely never will, maps can really change things. This is especially true when a mistake is deliberate and purposeful.
Enter the case of Agloe, NY, the Catskills version of a paper town. In cartographic circles, a copyright trap is the addition of some false information, like a dead-end street; and if that information gets repeated by another map publisher, the plagiarism is exposed. More interesting than a street is the addition of a hamlet – a phantom settlement. The name Agloe is derived from initials in the names Otto G. Lindberg and Ernest Alpers of the General Drafting Co., active back in the 1920s. Having the intended effect of snaring another company’s copying shortcut, the real fascination is that a place was created – or was it? Though the purpose was clear, Agloe had unintendedly breathed life into the actual location at the confluence of the Beaver Kill and Spring Brook in the town of Colchester. Both the Agloe General Store and the Agloe Lodge helped nourish the paper town’s roots for a spell, yet such evidence has faded from the landscape. Nevertheless, novelists - John Green’s Paper Towns (2008), and Peng Shepard’s The Cartographers (2022) - help sustain the curiosity with Agloe and its location.
Another sneaky cartographic inclusion is found on page 52 of the DeLorme New York State Atlas and Gazetteer. Nestled amongst the topo lines of Kaaterskill High Peak is a tiny caricature of a sleeping Rip Van Winkle. More playful and without consequence compared to Agloe, it demonstrates the lasting impact of the Catskills’ preeminent mythological figure. Alf Evers, in his Catskills from Wilderness to Woodstock, has great fun in describing the ubiquity of Rip’s presence in the names of organizations, commercial establishments, and throughout the Catskill Mountain landscape. Eventually Evers lands on the point that “the true Rip has become established more firmly than ever in a wider consciousness.” That the present-day gazetteer has Rip napping on public forest preserve land restores the invitation to venture into the old man’s haunts. Here, the natural amphitheaters still echo with thunder and could very well host a game of Ninepins. To reenact Rip’s journey into the craggy slopes of the higher mountains is to drink from the famed flagon and discover Rip’s presence in oneself.
Evers also relates the story of New Kingston, another Catskills hamlet that does not illustrate your average raison d’etre. Following the burning of Kingston by British forces in 1777, Robert Livingston, owner of vast stretches of land across the Catskills, aimed to grant acreage to those that lost their homes, in an area that had no settlements. Ultimately, a 500-acre area was to be divided into 100 50-acre parcels, giving the homeless a fresh start, a new Kingston. But the scheme didn’t catch on since the lands were on the frontier where the risk of conflict with native populations and other dangers prevailed.
From the geographer’s perspective, we appreciate how places come into being. Catching our eye are those places that don’t illustrate the more straightforward and typical connections between the earth’s natural features and its human settlers. New Kingston marks the creation of a new settlement for relocation purposes (though it didn’t turn out as originally intended). In this vein, we have the creation of the city of Brasilia, a remarkable story of place. At the midpoint of the 20th century, the capital of Brazil was to be relocated with the birth of this new city, some 575 miles northeast of the then capital of Rio de Janeiro. From an airplane, just like on the map, the design of the city purposely bears distinct resemblance to an airplane!
Given a clean slate to create a city, design on the land can take center stage. But even the clever symbology of Brasilia’s airplane cannot exist in a vacuum. The design signals the dependency on air travel, and the new city will always exist in awkward contrast to the bulk of country’s population that resides along the coast. In New Kingston, design may appear to be largely absent because the present-day hamlet blends in with so well with greater landscape. But that’s design too, though it more emerges from the earth rather than being placed on it. In appreciating the Catskills’ symbiotic relationship with New York City, we can take to the air, look at maps, and see our living landscape as an ecological organism. We can even climb a mountain and get a bird’s eye view of one of our hamlets. And just for a quiet moment -- that could last twenty years – we can feel the pulse of the place, its circulatory system flowing with clean, cool water that is made possible by the green-carpeted slopes that naturally filter this liquid of life.
Peter Manning is the executive director of the Catskill Mountain Club. To learn about CMC events, membership, and projects visit catskillmountainclub.org.
