How To Lie With Maps...even if it is an accident

500 communities put back on Georgia map By GREG BLUESTEIN, Associated Press Writer Thu Jan 4, 9:43 AM ET ATLANTA - Po Biddy Crossroads will be back on the map. So will Hopeulikit and Doctortown, and hundreds of others that were erased. (Yahoo News)

Georgia is not the first map publishing entity to clean up their maps by deleting features. Cartographers have been doing it for as long as maps have been written down for reasons as simple and innocent as reducing clutter to as nefarious as making a place not exist for political reasons. There was a push afoot in Virginia to delete Route 29 between Gainesville and Centreville, the thinking that people would take another route and thus reduce traffic on the two-lane part through the Battlefield. Of course, this sort of thinking is as malformed as thinking traffic can be reduced simply be refusing to enlarge the road. If you know something exists, then deleting a line on the map will not make it disappear. And depending on what it is, deleting it may be more obvious than just leaving the feature there.

If you are interesting in knowing more, noted geographer, Mark Monmonier, has an excellent book called How to Lie with Maps that I encourage you to read.