Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: Government

  • Arizona’s Wandering Capital

    The article I discovered was more than a year old, although it was new to me when I spotted it. The title intrigued me, Did You Know: Capital Of Arizona Moved 4 Times Before Settling In Phoenix. No, actually I didn’t know that. I’ve featured similar stories of wandering capitals for other states such as…

  • White House Christmas Tour

    Every once in awhile my proximity to the nation’s capital results in interesting opportunities. I got a chance to visit the White House somewhat by luck to see the 2015 Christmas decorations displayed for public viewing. This was the standard public tour — I’m no VIP just an average citizen — although it happened to…

  • Center of Power

    Pioneers migrating into the central sections of the United States during the Nineteenth Century found a unique opportunity to shape their governance. Counties formed across the prairie in precise straight lines. Often they platted the local seat of government somewhere conveniently in the middle. Names bestowed upon these geographic slices frequently reflected prominent local businessmen…

  • Airports in the District of Columbia

    Let’s refer back to the Airport Visits article. At that time I claimed that no airport existed within the physical boundaries of the District of Columbia. So unfortunately that would block me from ever traveling through airports in every state/territory/district in the United States. However, I want to put a little asterisk next to the…

  • Oglala Lakota County

    I pointed out that the the Wade Hampton Census Area in Alaska became the Kusilvak Census Area in a recent Reader Mailbag article. Alaska’s census areas exists as a unique construct. They serve as a convenient parceling of the Unorganized Borough while being considered “county equivalents” by the Federal government for a number of statistical…

  • Columbus Name Symmetry, Part 1

    Quite some time ago, way back in April 2012, Twelve Mile Circle posted an article called First Name, Surname Symmetry. It involved places where different levels of government nestled to form the full names of important people. Examples included the city Hernando, in De Soto County, Mississippi; the town of George in the state of…

  • Geographically Coded Plates

    Recently I spotted an automobile with a Nebraska license plate, or more properly a “vehicle registration plate” I suppose. That wasn’t an everyday occurrence here in the Mid-Atlantic more than 1,100 miles (1,770 kilometres) from that Midwestern state. Often I’ve wondered what would bring a driver such a long distance from his home after I’ve…

  • More Fill in Millard

    I noticed an anomaly as I pulled together the spreadsheet of every county named for a U.S. president for the recent Last Presidential Counties article. There was a single Millard County. It represented the only county designated for a president’s first name rather than his surname. Well, as far as I could determine. It got…

  • Cumberland

    People have expressed a couple of distinct thoughts as I’ve discussed my upcoming bike trip along the Great Allegheny Passage. The immediate reaction was that I must be crazy and then I’d explain that I’m not intending to ride it all in a single day. The second was confusion about its endpoint in Cumberland. Multiple…

  • Southern Swing, Part 2

    The second part of my quick southern trip moved west. We began in St. Augustine, Florida a couple of days earlier and now it was time to move on to family on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. This transformed into an exercise in county counting. My completion map of Florida counties changed dramatically for the better…