Category: History
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Digging for Minerals
A mine is a hole in the ground owned by a liar (attributed to Mark Twain). I began some initial planning for a brief county counting trip to West Virginia that I hope to undertake in a couple of months. Examining potential routes, I noted a county called Mineral that I would hit in some…
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Weather or Not
Several places named Hurricane — all found far from a coastline — interested me a few weeks ago. From there I wrote a simple article I called Inland Hurricane. I also wondered if the same peculiarity extended to other weather phenomena so I began to search some more. I found mixed results. Even so I…
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Moorish Revival
Occasionally Twelve Mile Circle likes to feature lesser known architectural styles. For example Rock Cut, Pueblo Deco, Egyptian Rivival and Octagons all appeared in these pages. I came across another one I found both fascinating and rare that I wanted to share. I’d never heard of Moorish Revival before. This design became modestly popular during…
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Weird Place Names Kept Coming
I found myself in familiar territory once again, with an overflowing backlog of article ideas. That signaled time for another round of house cleaning. In the past I’d featured weird place names that I’d encountered while I searched for other topics. Then I focused on More Weird Place Names and finally Even More Weird Place…
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Where’s Waldo?
I selected US Route 23 through Ohio as we drove back from Michigan. This would have been a long detour in normal circumstances. However I wanted to count a few new counties so I cut through a quiet slice of the state instead. So hours passed, boredom hovered nearby and I invented little non sequiturs…
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Brought Home from the Mexican War
Texas claimed its independence from Mexico in 1836 as a result of the Texas Revolution. It became a sovereign nation. Even so, Mexico considered Texas part of its rightful territory. Texas faced many difficulties during its early years as a new country as it struggled to keep going and it pushed to join the United…
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Michigan, Part 6 (Parting Shots)
I wrote several articles about my Michigan trip and I still had a pile of ideas I hadn’t touched yet. They didn’t fall into common themes so I lumped all those leftover scraps together to finish the series. I hope everyone enjoyed — or at least tolerated — my ramblings from the latest journey. We’ll…
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Michigan, Part 5 (Do Overs)
A Simple Observation I checked the Twelve Mile Circle dashboard this morning. The 1,276th article posted on Wednesday. I still cannot believe I came up with so many different topics. However, I do know that my writing evolved since that initial post on November 6, 2007. Early articles certainly contained few words. Now I delve…
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Michigan, Part 4 (Above and Below)
It wasn’t always easy finding sites that appealed to every member of the family during our Michigan trip. I searched high and low, from way up in the sky to deep undersea, for our little day trips during our week away from home. Local roads took us to three different places in three distinct directions…
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Michigan, Part 2 (Breweries)
Most people seemed confused whenever I mentioned Grand Rapids, Michigan as our vacation destination this year. They could understand a holiday at the seashore or in the mountains or traveling abroad. A mid-sized Midwestern city specializing in consumer manufacturing seemed considerably less intuitive to them. Then I revealed the true reason: its great concentration of…