Spent 45 minutes searching for a town that never existed on an old map of Ohio

I was looking at this 1870s map of Licking County, Ohio and found this tiny town called "Millbrook" marked near the Licking River. I spent way too long scrolling through historical records, census data, and old newspapers trying to find any mention of it. After about 45 minutes I realized the town was just a misprint or a joke by the mapmaker because it appeared on exactly one map from that year and then vanished. The ink was even slightly smudged too so it might have just been a random spec that someone circled. Has anyone else run into fake towns on old maps or was this some cartographer having fun at my expense lol?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_sean17d ago

Wait what? That ink smudge thing is actually hilarious. Imagine some bored cartographer in 1872 just circling a random spot on the map and some guy 150 years later is losing his mind over it lmao.

parker_patel8417d ago

Man I feel your pain. I've definitely been there before with old maps and fake towns. Here's the thing, once you've done enough historical map research you learn to check for stuff like ink smudges or repeated errors across different maps before going down a rabbit hole. @the_sean is right that some cartographers just trolled people for fun, but also sometimes a printer's mistake just gets copied by other mapmakers for years. I'd recommend you grab a copy of "Ghost Towns of Ohio" or check the Library of Congress map collection online to cross reference any future discoveries. And yeah, Millbrook probably never existed, but at least you got a good story out of it.