Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: History

  • Upstart Eclipses Namesake

    When I think of “New” places I tend to fuse together the full placenames mentally into a single phrase and begin to overlook the separate elements. I don’t forget completely that earlier entities inspired newer ones, although I mostly overlook the original namesake within the larger string. For example, if I considered Orléans in France…

  • When Planners Get Bored

    I’ve been collecting a bunch of oddly shaped and unusually themed neighborhoods and didn’t know what to do with them. They didn’t have any similarity amongst them, even appearing in completely different parts of the world, although I wondered if perhaps I could force them into a set anyway. The first notion that came to…

  • Menacing Island

    I spied an island full of deviants. What else could explain a cluster of geographic features with names such as Freak, Lunatic, Menace, Germ, Moron, Filthy and Maniac? I plotted my discoveries along with several other bizarre placenames I’d encountered within a single map. This included the only spot in the United States named, and…

  • Fire or Fir

    If visitors to the Twelve Mile Circle come from a town with an odd name they’re automatically fodder for an article. I’ll dig until I find something memorable just on principle. Additionally, I’ll note that a single letter, the scant difference between Fire and Fir in this instance, could alter meanings considerably. Maybe I should…

  • Municipally Owned Telephone

    Many municipalities have considered or have already started to provide broadband services to their residents directly. They intentionally bypass numerous commercial enterprises that specialize in those functions. There were more than 100 cities doing that already just in the United States alone in 2011. Control over speed and pricing offered one big reason. A desire…

  • Bostonian Confusion and I Don’t Mean Massachusetts

    I kept things vague when I discussed Boston — the Boston in Texas — in Named Like a Whole Other Country. I stopped at “the man who opened the first store in the area was W. J. Boston.” Otherwise I might have tipped my hand that I’d discovered three Texas Bostons all within about four…

  • Named Like a Whole Other Country

    What if I said that I could drive from Atlanta to Detroit, or Cleveland to Santa Fe, or Miami to Memphis in an hour and a half? So how about driving from Jacksonville to Buffalo in an hour? No, I didn’t say fly, I said drive. My apologies in advance to the international audience that…

  • DeKalb

    DeKalb felt like such an odd choice for a relatively common place name in the United States. I’d seen it a number of times in various widely-distributed locations over the years. I’d pondered its pronunciation which generally seemed to sound like dee-KAB with a silent L. So, naturally I wondered about its origin. It didn’t…

  • Giant Artichoke

    I spent a few summers in Monterey, California when I was a kid. We’d land at the airport in San Francisco and drive south, cutting across the mouth of the agriculturally-oriented Salinas Valley before heading down towards the Monterey Peninsula. Oftentimes we’d stop in Castroville along the way for a special treat. The Route Through…

  • City of Frogs

    I love statistical clustering. Another moment of weirdness revealed itself on my never-ending family history quest. I’ve oftentimes searched for months without finding anything beyond mundane anecdotes of routine life. However, the latest one was far better. It actually tied to geography in a concrete way so bear with me as I provide context, or…