The MaxMind Farm (38°N, 97°W) RoadyGoat
2002This is the farm that the internet accidentally declared digital public enemy number one. In the early 2000s, the geolocation company MaxMind needed a default latitude and longitude for any U.S. IP address it couldn't actually pinpoint. Someone rounded the geographic center of the country down to a clean 38 degrees north, 97 degrees west — and that single coordinate happened to land in the front yard of a private farm just outside Potwin, Kansas. For more than a decade after that, every untraceable IP in America — hundreds of millions of them — pointed right here. Whenever someone used a VPN, committed online fraud, made a bomb threat, or ran a scam, the trail led to this exact spot on Google Maps. The Taylors lived here first. The Arnolds rented the place starting in 2011. Neither family had any idea why the FBI, the sheriff, bounty hunters, angry scam victims, and strangers kept showing up at all hours. People left broken toilets in the driveway. Someone left a death threat. Deputies came back again and again. Nobody could explain it until 2016, when journalist Kashmir Hill traced the mystery back to a single rounding error in MaxMind's database. The family sued. MaxMind eventually moved its default point to the middle of a lake. But many databases still hadn't updated for years. A tiny lazy shortcut in a few lines of code, and one quiet Kansas farm became the address of every anonymous crime on the internet.
