Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: History

  • Major Basilicas

    The Basilica of Sacré-Cœur sat high atop Montmartre, as noted recently in Select City Highpoints, becoming a memorable landmark on the Parisian skyline. Setting that aside, I wondered what made a church a basilica. In the course of investigating that I learned that a basilica falls into one of several levels of significance within the…

  • Dallas Park Cooperative Housing

    Twelve Mile Circle posted an article I titled Mutual Ownership Defense Housing in January 2014. It focused on a little-known unit of the of the United States government’s Federal Works Agency. This resulted in eight housing developments constructed between 1940 and 1942. Seven of them thrived. However the eighth seemed lost to history, a place…

  • 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…