Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: History

  • Odds and Ends 9

    I’ve collected another raft of small discoveries not nearly meaty enough to stretch into an entire article on their own. 12MC readers have also been kind enough to make me aware of some unusual situations. That must mean it’s time once again for an installment of Odds and Ends, our ongoing collection of bite-sized morsels.…

  • Placentia is Not a Flat Cake

    The trouble with words that look almost alike is that they can mean completely different things. Case in point, I noticed a 12MC website hit from a visitor in Placentia, a town in Newfoundland & Labrador, in Canada. I seemed to recall somewhere in the recesses of my mind that there was also a Placentia…

  • Move Along, Nothing to See Here

    The signs claimed “On this site in 1897 nothing happened.” It felt mildly amusing, maybe even a tiny bit clever the first time — the first time! — I saw one of their ilk several years ago. They mimicked the look-and-feel of genuine historical markers with faux cast iron, bold font, adorned with a couple…

  • Public Bridleway

    I noticed that OpenStreetMap included “Tag:highway=bridleway” along with “designation=public_bridleway.” That’s awesome! A bridleway is an equestrian trail or a horse-friendly road. Perhaps it might even be considered a highway for horses according to the OpenStreeMap tag. Some of them trace back to ancient transit corridors. However, others are of more modern vintage having been developed…

  • Webby Finds

    I can’t seem to make a dent in my list of potential Twelve Mile Circle articles. I keep writing steadily and in the process I run into several more morsels that go onto a never-ending pile. It appears I’ve created a perpetual motion machine. I’m going to do something I haven’t done in a very…

  • Colonial Colleges

    I made a passing reference to the Colonial Colleges of the United States recently in King’s College Tract. There are over four thousand colleges and universities in the U.S. that award degrees today. But only nine of them — the so-called Colonial Colleges — acquired a charter before the United States gained independence. So I…

  • King’s College Tract

    I came across a tiny, minor footnote as I researched Yankee Doodle Dunce, an account of allegedly independent nations that joined the United States. This story involved Vermont specifically. The situation occurred within the confusing, overlapping New York royal decrees and New Hampshire Grants. The turmoil of the American Revolutionary War further compounded the situation.…

  • Reader Mailbag

    This is a rather special edition in a long series of intermittent Odds and Ends articles. I will call it Reader Mailbag for the obvious reason. Yes, comments, emails and tweets from Twelve Mile Circle readers inspired this one more than anything else. These topics were all completely unknown to me previously. So maybe I…

  • I Call Bull Shark

    What a glorious day for boating on the tidal Potomac River around Mason Neck, south of Fort Belvior. A friend asked it we’d like to join him and his family for a day on the water and of course I couldn’t turn down such a generous offer. We spent most of the afternoon on the…

  • Plank Roads

    I used to drive between Washington, DC and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, nearly every weekend for about eighteen months a number of years ago. I became very familiar with the route and every landmark placed upon it as one might imagine. One of those included an exit for Boydton Plank Road along Interstate 85 near…