Pro tip: That old gas station map from the 60s might actually show a town that never existed

I was looking through a map of rural Nevada from 1965 last week and found a dot labeled 'Lakewood' that I've never heard of anywhere. Turns out some oil companies used to put fake towns on their giveaway maps to catch map thieves, and I think I stumbled onto one by accident last month. Has anyone else found a phantom town on an old promotional map?

1 comments

1 Comment

karent759d ago

Whoa wait, those fake towns are actually called 'trap streets' or 'phantom settlements' and they're usually put in by map companies to catch copyright thieves, not gas stations. lol I remember reading that they're more common in atlases and road maps than promotional gas station maps, but it's still possible. I've seen one in an old Texaco map from the 70s that had a place called 'Echo' in Utah that doesn't exist anywhere else.