Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: History

  • Triple Letter

    An unwary visitor arriving on the Twelve Mile Circle through some random search once again provided fodder for an article topic. The query forwarded by search software said: “name of the county, state and cities starts with s?” Usually this means someone is trying to complete an online geography contest or perhaps an old-school crossword…

  • Canal Becomes Subway

    I wrote about Abandoned Canals in Canada several months ago. That then prompted a comment from loyal 12MC reader Bill Harris. He noted an unusual re-purposing of an abandoned canal across the border in the United States. Specifically he referenced a portion of the Erie Canal that originally flowed through downtown Rochester, NY (part of…

  • Quad County Towns, Crowdsourced

    I knew I barely scratched the surface with Quad County Towns, a collection of municipalities that sprawled across the boundaries of four different counties. Examples were surprisingly difficult to find so I turned it over to the Twelve Mile Circle audience who quickly doubled my feeble efforts by appending comments. I hadn’t planned on writing…

  • Oldest Continuous Businesses

    I enjoyed Wikipedia’s List of Oldest Companies when I bounced onto it randomly, and of course it included a geographic component. Using the list, I examined claims from various parts of the world. However, let’s consider that these represent claims. References and websites for individual companies often hedge their bets. They used qualifiers such as…

  • Rapid Transit in 1844

    I’ve slowly been overhauling the non-12MC part of my website to upgrade to Google Maps API v3. That’s the portion for which I obtained the howderfamily.com domain long before Twelve Mile Circle became the tail wagging the dog. As part of that I revisited a genealogy page I wrote about ten years ago. It looked…

  • Jeff Davis

    I received an interesting query from loyal reader “Katy” via the 12MC Google+(1) account the other day. She wanted to find towns named after people that included the namesakes’ first and last names.(2) Several possibilities came to mind and one name in particular, Jefferson Davis, kept recurring. Jefferson Davis — which I’ll mention primarily for…

  • Dust Bowl Adventure, Part 4 (On the Road)

    The race series moved on to Colorado next. We’d intended to check into our hotel room in Lamar and sit by the pool, using that as an opportunity for our sole afternoon of rest. The hotel must have been busy the previous evening because our room wouldn’t be available for another three hours. We needed…

  • Dust Bowl Adventure, Part 2 (Sea of Grass)

    An odd feature of my Dust Bowl trip is that I drive for hours with little or nothing to see beyond the awesome natural beauty of the Great Plains until it’s punctuated by a tightly-bound space overflowing with geographic anomalies and historical sites. One such place is Morton County in the far southwestern corner of…

  • Three Notches

    Marks on trees served as road signs during North America’s colonial times, a period when much of the population was illiterate. Certain patterns of slashes or notches conveyed specific information about the nature of a pike or landmarks a traveler might find farther down down its path. Three notches served as a frequent glyph although…

  • Canadian Ethnic Enclave

    The intersection of my various hobbies provides a nice tangential benefit for Twelve Mile Circle. It offers a steady stream of curiosities and article ideas. I like to look through census records and use Street View to see if I can spy on the former homes of ancestors and distant relatives. Many of the census…