Category: Borders
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Confluence of Confluences
I began to consider confluences while pondering the Confluence Brewing Company during my recent Geo-BREWities exercise. Maybe I should credit Google Map’s auto-completion function for the suggestion after I typed the brewery name into an address bar. It noted that at least one town of Confluence existed. A quick check of the Geographic Names Information…
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Geo-BREWities
My interests collide every once in awhile. I’ve mentioned my unnatural compulsion to visit breweries several times before. So, an overlap shouldn’t come as a surprise to regular readers. This time, an industry publication mentioned a beer dinner where they paired courses with beverages from Oxbow Beer in Maine. A brewery named for an oxbow…
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Georgia’s Enigma
A couple of earlier topics conglomerated conceptually in my mind to create my recent fascination with the U.S. state of Georgia’s Enigma. I discovered Enigma — it’s an actual town in Georgia that has about 1,200 residents — as I researched Shaped Like it Sounds (Street Edition). Enigma contained an Ell Street, which indeed resembled…
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Longest Routes for Smaller Areas
The Twelve Mile Circle audience loves little puzzles. Knowing that, I thought I might try to fold a couple of related ideas that have fascinated lately into a single entry. First Dimension I looked back to one of the more popular 12MC concepts, the Longest Google Maps Routes. I published that about eighteen months ago…
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Middle of Nowhere
I once searched for and found the Center of the Universe. Never mind that there were plenty of other claimants, I found the one true center naturally because the Intertubes confirmed it and of course that made it unquestionably true. It was much more difficult to find the middle of nowhere. First one must discover…
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Odds and Ends 9
I’ve collected another raft of small discoveries not nearly meaty enough to stretch into an entire article on their own. 12MC readers have also been kind enough to make me aware of some unusual situations. That must mean it’s time once again for an installment of Odds and Ends, our ongoing collection of bite-sized morsels.…
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Highpoint, Not Summit
I was reminded recently, as I updated an old page, that not every U.S. state highpoint can be found on the summit of its parent landform. Boundaries don’t always follow geographic contours like rivers or ridges. Oftentimes segments are composed of straight lines determined by agreement or treaty or negotiation regardless of the underlying terrain.…
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Reader Mailbag
This is a rather special edition in a long series of intermittent Odds and Ends articles. I will call it Reader Mailbag for the obvious reason. Yes, comments, emails and tweets from Twelve Mile Circle readers inspired this one more than anything else. These topics were all completely unknown to me previously. So maybe I…
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Plank Roads
I used to drive between Washington, DC and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, nearly every weekend for about eighteen months a number of years ago. I became very familiar with the route and every landmark placed upon it as one might imagine. One of those included an exit for Boydton Plank Road along Interstate 85 near…
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Overwhelming Union
I thought Disunion Averted would be straightforward. Union City, Indiana was on one side of a state boundary and Union City, Ohio was on the other. Fortunately I could search on the Indiana location because the town in Ohio kept generating false positives. Search engines wanted to point me towards the City of Union instead.…