Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: History

  • Gibraltaresque

    I didn’t intend to feature Gibraltar, the British Overseas Territory on the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula. I talked about that one before. For example, a major road crossed its airport runway. Fun stuff! One other little tidbit interested me too, its etymology. Gibraltar came from the name of an Arab or Berber military…

  • An Arm and a Leg

    I stumbled upon Joe Batt’s Arm again. I first became acquainted with Joe Batt and his arm when Twelve Mile Circle investigated Mundane First Name Places about a year ago. The settlement grew along an inlet, colloquially called an arm, that formed a part of its name. It still amused me all these months later…

  • Moron

    Calling someone a moron would be offensive, maybe even fighting words. It derived from Greek for stupid or foolish, and later came down through Latin with a similar meaning, then finally passed along to modern languages. I knew it retained that meaning when it came to English, certainly more widely recognized than the colloquial use…

  • Any Excuse for a Road Trip, Part 3 (Cape Girardeau)

    My brief Easter Weekend road trip focused the majority of its time on Cape Girardeau, Missouri. That consisted of a couple of hours poking around downtown on Friday evening and then the race the following morning. Nonetheless it still consumed the bulk of our waking hours in a single location. We initially rolled into town…

  • Any Excuse for a Road Trip, Part 2 (Short Haul)

    Now I needed to execute my ambitious plan, a long weekend drive that would result in my capture of 24 previously unvisited counties. Friday, the first day, covered fewer miles than Saturday or Sunday. However, I made up for that shorter distance with plenty of sightseeing activities. I’d never traveled between St. Louis and Cape…

  • Directional Surname Frequency

    I spotted South Street in Manly, Iowa as I wrote Even More Manly Places. Ordinarily that wouldn’t generate much attention. For some reason I found it entertaining to see a South with an east and a west. One could go to East South or West South, although apparently nowhere southeast or southwest. Ditto for North…

  • Even More Ladylike Places

    Most readers probably anticipated that after slogging through Manly Places, Even More Manly Places, and Ladylike Places, that the next in this series would be Even More Ladylike Places. That seemed absolutely necessary in my mind to create symmetry and closure. However I’d written a variation on this theme already with the recently-published Ladysmith. I…

  • Even More Manly Places

    I didn’t realize the earlier Manly Places would get much of a reaction. Actually the title did suggest an element of foreshadowing. Everyone in the Twelve Mile Circle audience who thought it should have featured places named Manly, go ahead and take a bow. I intended to link the previous article to this one all…

  • Bizarre Broomfield Borders

    Recently Twelve Mile Circle focused a couple of articles on the boundaries of Virginia’s independent cities. That led loyal reader Scott Surgent to comment on an equally strange situation in Broomfield County, Colorado. I certainly knew about Broomfield because of its status as one of the newest and smallest of U.S. counties. It didn’t exist…

  • Saint Alban Spreads

    Various saints appeared in recent Twelve Mile Circle articles, most recently On the Feast Day. I didn’t intent to fixate on them. The names of saints, both notable and obscure, kept coming to my attention as I researched other articles. I couldn’t simply ignore them. Take Saint Alban, for instance. Perhaps if I lived in…