Anyone ever check out those towns on Google earth that have a name but when you zoom in there’s no buildings or roads?

Found a few around my area that are all along an old railroad. Plenty of houses that were never complete, and some abandoned excavators too, but nothing too special. What’s your experience with these?

Posted by ArcticRattler Anyone ever check out those towns on Google earth that have a name but when you zoom in there’s no buildings or roads? Found a few around my area that are all along an old railroad. Plenty of houses that were never complete, and some abandoned excavators too, but nothing too special. What’s your experience with these?

I know I've spotted a few listed under the catagory historic landmark before. Then the whole area is just a field.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm sure it's just a ton of towns that once existed along some kind of industry, and when said industry (atleast in that area) went away so did the people

Found one town that used to have hundreds of residents, now down to a whopping 13, If I were as into exploring as I am now I would've totally checked out the abandoned church that was there.

Some of them are also dummy locations which Google and other companies use to tell if people are stealing their imagery.

Posted by MrBungle I know I've spotted a few listed under the catagory historic landmark before. Then the whole area is just a field. Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm sure it's just a ton of towns that once existed along some kind of industry, and when said industry (atleast in that area) went away so did the people Found one town that used to have hundreds of residents, now down to a whopping 13, If I were as into exploring as I am now I would've totally checked out the abandoned church that was there.

Yeah, most of them are. Did some more research and apparently the place I saw was demolished a while back. The equipment and houses I saw there were extremely new though. Maybe in the last 5-10 years. It’s all pretty untouched. It’s almost like there was an attempt to rebuild? No idea.

Posted by mookster Some of them are also dummy locations which Google and other companies use to tell if people are stealing their imagery.

NYC-area mapper Hagstrom was famous for this. Mostly non-existent streets, but most well known were a removed island and a subway line in Queens that was never built.

Posted by ArcticRattler Anyone ever check out those towns on Google earth that have a name but when you zoom in there’s no buildings or roads? Found a few around my area that are all along an old railroad. Plenty of houses that were never complete, and some abandoned excavators too, but nothing too special. What’s your experience with these?

We seem to have lost our ability to resize pictures with the BB code.

Because mappers draw from a number of sources, they get a lot of obsolete information.

Sometimes the name of the town changes depending on the zoom level:

Like Douglas:



Zoom in more and it becomes Tara.



Then there are these that I knew about long before we had Google or even the internet.

Gardner:

If you actually go there, there's small sign in the trees for Gardner.



Tobe:

Tobe shows up on a lot of old maps because there is a spring nearby for the Granada Santa Fe Trail. This was a branch of the Santa Fe Trail known as the the dry route because of the lack of available water along the trail. The location of a spring would be a definite point of interest.

People chose this route because it bypassed the toll road over over Raton Pass. So yes, 150 years ago, people were going out of their way to avoid paying tolls.



Glentivar:

In South Park, Colorado (yes, that's real place) was Glentivar. My friend Morgan told me there was a one-building town (general store, post office and apartments in none building) there that vanished in the 1960s.



Villegreen:

Villegreen has an abandoned store that was abandone when I was there in the 1980s, but Realtor.com says there are 3 million-dollar homes for sale there.

I noticed that cell phone tower service maps have a LOT of old/obscure town/hamlet/etc names on them.

Map makers also use fake streets to see if anyone is stealing from them

It's also sometimes fun to go to Google Maps streetview in an area that is recently demolished or something, and see if there are street views of how it used to look.

Pilot / aerial photographer Louis Helbig made these photos a few years back. Beautiful shots of the remains of some Ontario villages and hamlets upriver from Cornwall that were razed to the ground before the St. Lawrence River was flooded to create the Seaway and the Moses-Saunders Power Dam.

https://sunkenvillages.ca/villages/

There's a panoramic map in this LDB entry that illustrates the extent of the flooding / excavating / dam building required to put that massive engineering project together.

https://www.uer.ca...ow.asp?locid=23601