Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History

by Andrew Carroll

There’s no reason she should have, since it’s entirely made up. Beatosu is a “paper town,” one of countless fictitious entries—along with fake roads, alleyways, streams, mountains, lakes—that lurk on various U.S. and foreign maps. Cartographers include these on road atlases as either boredom-killing pranks or, more legitimately, as “copyright traps” to catch competitors who’ve duplicated their information instead of doing original research. Beatosu was snuck onto the map I’m carrying by Peter Fletcher, chairman of the Michigan State Highway Commission and a proud University of Michigan alumnus who couldn’t resist poking fun at the Wolverines’ archrival, Ohio State University. Beatosu’s more accurate pronunciation is “Beat OSU.” Since mapmakers are reluctant to compromise their product’s overall integrity, they usually place the traps in remote areas or make only subtle manipulations to real geographical points, like giving an actual street some slight wiggles when in reality it’s perfectly straight. Print and online reference editors have their own tricks to snare copycats. The New Oxford American Dictionary once included the word esquivalience—defined reproachfully as “the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities.” And years ago the New Columbia Encyclopedia profiled Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, a fountain designer and accomplished photo-essayist from Bangs, Ohio, whose life was tragically cut short “at the age of thirty-one in an explosion while on assignmen...