Category: U.S. Counties
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Stair Step Border
A jagged border exists between Perry and Yell Counties in Arkansas. It comes with fifteen perfectly-aligned steps rising northeasterly like a superhuman staircase stenciled upon the landscape. The path traverses land and lakes alike, in a noticeably precise pattern. It seemed rather unusual to me. More commonly one would expect to see a border drawn…
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Iconic Views
Skip directly to the bottom if you want to be part of a little contest. Otherwise feel free to read through my blathering extended explanation of context for a few moments. I featured a nice Google Street View image of the historic Hume School in Arlington County, Virginia recently. It seemed familiar, and not because…
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Dr. Howder Road
It looks like I’ll need to write an article today seeing how the world didn’t end last night. Thankfully I hedged my bets and started my research well in advance. Otherwise I’d be struggling with a suitable topic this morning. Calling Dr. Howder I’ve start with a question: Who was Dr. Howder and why does…
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Google Maps County Lines on the Way?
Are county boundaries finally on the way to Google Maps? County Counters including myself have bemoaned the complete lack of county lines in Maps, having to rely on Mapquest and other sources instead. Last night, however, I went to Google and searched on Fayette County, Pennsylvania. The result shocked me. Check it out! That’s an…
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County Counter Extraordinaire
Fritz Keppler of Arlington, Virginia recently discovered my humble Twelve Mile Circle blog as he searched for the boundaries of the Sandoval County exclave. He’s quickly become a regular reader and contributor in the comments section over the last few weeks. One early comment caught my eye in particular. I fixated on its enormity as…
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The State of Wayne
I first uncovered a reference to the State of Wayne in a hundred year-old book as I researched the various Van Buren erasures in 19th century Missouri. I noted this fascinating term of art in my records. One never knows when such a thing might come in handy. It gained a prominent place on my…
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12 Mile Circ… no wait, 16!
[UPDATE: 16 Mile Brewing Company CLOSED in September 2018] Look at the bottle my wife brought home from the grocery store a few days ago. Can you see the name of the brewery on the bottle? That’s the 16 Mile Brewing Company. More importantly, the brewery is located in Delaware. Now, I’ve heard of a…
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I’ve Barely Been There
I’ve been to all of the 50 United States as is true with several others of you who read Twelve Mile Circle regularly. In fact, that’s what got me started on the strange hobby of County Counting. I ran out of things to count so I had to break the individual states into their sub-units…
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Random Canadian
The pursuit of geo-oddities is a passion of mine, but not my only one. History, and by extension personal history (genealogy) is another. Sometimes the two intertwine. I’ve long known of a family line tangential to mine that associated with the early history of Canadian, Texas (map). Their involvement began with the founding of Canadian…
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Erasing Van Buren
Political debates come and go. What happens, however, when people live in a place named after a politician they despise? That doesn’t happen very often anymore. Just about every geographic location got its name a long time ago, at least in the United States. The nation expanded furiously in the first half of the Nineteenth…