Category: History
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Riverboat Adventure, Part 4 (History)
The rich history of the Lower Mississippi valley didn’t start with the Europeans. What they left behind however became an indelible legacy along the banks of a river that mirrored the growing pains of a nascent nation. These continued to reverberate into modern times. We attempted to immerse ourselves in various facets spanning multiple centuries.…
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Riverboat Adventure, Part 3 (Borders)
Europeans began to subdivide the Lower Mississippi watershed into various colonial claims, and the nascent United States carved it further into states, counties and even smaller units. They used the rivers as boundaries in some instances, and straight lines laid arbitrarily in others. Both interacted to form an awesome string of geo-oddities throughout the region.…
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Riverboat Adventure, Part 2 (Original Inhabitants)
Long before Europeans and their descendants tagged the Lower Mississippi River valley with a cornucopia of artificial lines, forming states, and counties, and meridians and so forth, the area already had a remarkable human history. Native Americans left behind laboriously-constructed earthen mounds. Those served a variety of residential, ceremonial and funereal purposes all along the…
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The Pitch
A long-term member of the 12MC community and I were discussing dream jobs lately, ones that combined our slightly obsessive-compulsive list-making tendencies with our respective divergent interests. Mine focused on geographic and historic oddities of multiple flavors tied together with a healthy string of County Counting progressions. The trick, as we thought about it, was…
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Named for Schoolcraft
I’ve been following Every County lately while the author winds his way virtually through, well, every county. He was at the northern end of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula at the time of publication. Slowly he’s blogging his was down from the Straits of Mackinac. The name Schoolcraft(¹) kept recurring as I read through new installments, a…
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More Full Names
I enjoyed compiling a list of Full Name counties in the United States earlier this week. In a comment “The Basement Geographer” improved the article significantly with a list of similarly-constructed counties in Canada. It was great work on his part. Readers should refer back to his comment and check it out. That led me…
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Full Name Counties
Almost exactly a year ago, 12MC published Jeff Davis, a treatise on the use of the Confederate leader’s full name as a geographic identifier at the county level of government. Davis County wasn’t a good enough name for some of those deeply-Southern states. No, it had to be Jeff Davis or the more formal Jefferson…
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Pre-Nazi Swastika Architectural Details
I traveled into the Twelve Mile Circle — the Delaware geo-oddity that inspired the name for this site — while visiting with some dear friends last weekend. In Wilmington, at Rodney Square specifically, I happened to glance up. There I noticed the wonderful Egyptian Revival architectural details on the Wilmington Public Library. My earlier Egyptian…
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TGIF
I’ve long wanted to add Washington’s San Juan County to my county counting list and maybe someday I’ll succeed. Pondering that eventuality I began to grow increasingly curious about its only incorporated town, Friday Harbor (map). Specifically I wondered about the story behind its name. It seemed unusual to name a settlement after a day…