Stopped trusting old maps after that antique shop find in Portland

I was at an antique shop on Hawthorne last month and bought a 1920s road map of Oregon for $30, but when I tried to follow it to a ghost town it listed, the road just ended in a farmer's field. The store owner told me later that map was a promotional gimmick printed by a real estate company to sell plots that never existed. Has anyone else been burned by a map that was totally made up?

2 comments

2 Comments

flores.tessa8d ago

That map still sounds useful even if it led to a field, a lot of old maps had promotional towns that never got built but still show the history of what people were hoping for back then. You can learn a lot about the region's past by seeing where developers thought the next big thing would pop up, even if it never happened. Honestly getting burned by a fake map just means you have a cool story and a piece of local history that most people will never come across.

elizabeth_gonzalez9d ago

Oh man, that's a classic bait and switch! I bought a "vintage" map of mining claims in Nevada once, followed it to a spot that was supposedly a thriving 1850s boomtown, and found nothing but a sad little outhouse and some rusty cans. Guess the real estate company was a little too optimistic about their "city of the future." Hope you didn't pay extra for the frame.