Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: Government

  • Old Greer County

    I talked about the longest postal route in the United States recently. That saga recounted Jim Ed Bull and his 187.6 mi (302 km) daily slog from Mangum, Oklahoma through the rural countryside. I also discovered an interesting bit of trivia during my research. This little corner of southwestern Oklahoma used to be part of…

  • Can’t Get Enough of Kossuth

    The formation and expansion of Kossuth County in the 1850’s discussed in The Odd Case of Iowa’s Largest County pointed to a simple question. So who was Kossuth? That string led me to Lajos Kossuth. I was wholly unfamiliar with the name. Also I wondered why a county deep within the American heartland would honor…

  • The Odd Case of Iowa’s Largest County

    I had a fascinating Twitter conversation with Steve from Connecticut Museum Quest recently. He has a much more interesting Twitter feed @CTMQ than my mundane @TheReal12MC. Seriously, I don’t have much to say on Twitter other than using it to announce each new article and maybe posting a few beer pictures occasionally. A few people…

  • Republic of Indian Stream

    The short-lived Republic of Indian Stream owed its existence to frustrations rooted in divergent interpretations of the Treaty of Paris that ended the American Revolutionary War between the United States and Great Britain. The treaty included a number of provisions including those designed to establish firm boundaries between Canada and the United States. Ironically, a…

  • Colonias

    I failed to mention a specific Milwaukee example in the recent I Before E Like in Milwaukie article. That was intentional. I noticed a rather unusual reference included within the Geographic Names Information System that deserved further observation. This one featured two adjoining neighborhoods. They had the dubious distinction of sharing a name with a…

  • A Prisoner to Geo-Oddities

    I noticed a reference to a prison in Alaska that turned out to be located not too distant from where I roamed around the Kenai Peninsula during my journeys a few summers ago. It was a prison with a view, in fact it was located somewhere (map) in the background of this photo I took…

  • My Smallest Park

    Twelve Mile Circle published a very rare guest post in March 2011 discussing Geo-Oddities of Portland, Oregon. It featured several unusual items including the famous Mill Ends Park (map). The Notion Readers might be familiar with the spot. It’s garnered a lot of attention from mainstream sources over the years because of its diminutive size.…

  • Presidential Distances

    Twelve Mile Circle talked about birthplaces and death locations of the Presidents of the United States. Now let’s finish this off with a comparison of distances between those two points. This involved a rather simple process of dropping the lat/long coordinates for each president into a great circle distance calculator and recording the results. Then…

  • Presidential Death Locations

    After examining birthplaces of the Presidents of the United States, I shifted gears and did the same thing for the places where they died. This became a little more problematic. Historians place more attention on exact places of birth, undoubtedly because it’s a more cheerful subject. I began with the shared spreadsheet compiled in the…

  • Presidential Birthplaces

    I’m not sure why I began to think about the birthplaces of every President of the United States. Maybe this might interest people, or so I considered. However I wasn’t fooling myself — I did it for me. Theoretically I could pass through one of these areas someday in the future and I might want…