Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: Cities/Towns

  • Reader Mailbag 3

    Twelve Mile Circle finds itself with an overflowing mailbag once again with lots of intriguing readers suggestions. Each one of these could probably form an entire article. However, I’ll provide the short versions today to try to clear the backlog. Once again, I’ll say gladly that 12MC has the best readers. I really appreciate learning…

  • Hot Springs Everywhere

    Twelve Mile Circle has featured hot springs before. There was Hot Springs, Virginia in Taking a Bath. There was Hot Springs County, Wyoming and its county seat of Thermopolis in The Largest Smallest US County. Geothermal activities existed in many places and I’d taken notice plenty of times. Nonetheless it mildly surprised me when I…

  • More Presidential County Sorting

    I found one surprising benefit to the tedious research that went into the recent Last Presidential Counties article. Now I could sort through the data differently and come up with several unexpected yet equally fascinating facts. It produced enough material for a second article. But don’t think of these as leftovers! They stand on their…

  • Last Presidential Counties

    Reader Steve Spivey contacted Twelve Mile Circle and floated an idea about U.S. counties named for presidents. He’d traveled through Taylor County in Georgia and recalled a Taylor County in Florida. Could they be related? Well yes, they bore the name of the 12th President of the United States, Zachary Taylor. That led him to…

  • Half of Something is Better Than Nothing

    Would Twelve Mile Circle stoop so low as to devote an entire article to a bad pun? Well yes, I’ve gone there before. The Operative Phrase Non-native English speakers in the audience deserve an explanation in advance. When something is said to be half-assed it implies that the effort used to produce it was insufficient,…

  • It’s Not Always About Abe

    In the United States, twenty-three states have a Lincoln County (or a Parish in the case of Louisiana). That’s nearly half. We should expect that. Certainly a man who led the nation through a traumatic civil war and who died tragically at the hand of an assassin deserved numerous place named for him. Geographic features…

  • End of the Line

    Many longtime Twelve Mile Circle readers probably already guessed that this article that would come next. Immediately after a story about the beginning of the alphabet, naturally one would expect to find one about the end. It became an equally difficult task too, except for the most notable location. Take a moment to ponder this…

  • Head of the Class

    I thought back to my school days when a teacher would call roll alphabetically. Naturally people with surnames like Anderson would get the first call. Mine fell somewhere in the middle so I had to pay attention for a little while. Then I could daydream for the rest of the drill. However, I always felt…

  • Traveling’s Greatest Hits

    It occurred to me, as I wrote two recent travelogues, that I’d visited a lot of interesting places in the last few years. I recorded my thoughts and impressions from those journeys on the pages of Twelve Mile Circle. The intent was to describe my adventures while still fresh in my mind. Looking back through…

  • Islands and Cape, Part 2 (Momentous History)

    Coastal Massachusetts had plenty of history before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620. Native Americans long lived there. Even other Europeans explored the area. Nonetheless it was the Pilgrims we all remembered from our elementary school curriculum and a lifetime of Thanksgiving holidays. So that’s where I began. I’d been wanting to go…