Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: History

  • Captain Thunderbolt

    Captain Thunderbolt, despite a name seemingly custom-designed for a comic book, was not a superhero. He certainly couldn’t stop bullets from penetrating his chest. I went in search of places named for “Captains Less Prestigious” recently. The effort intended to find memorable places associated with second-tier captains who never achieved the same level of fame…

  • Chincoteague and Assateague

    The dirty little secret of the geo-oddities blogger community is that there’s only so much geographic weirdness to go around. We all tend to overlap with our material from time-to-time, and that’s fine. We each apply our own spin on a common set facts to develop something original and creative. I’d been trying to think…

  • New Sweden

    The New Sweden colony first made an appearance in Twelve Mile Circle a few weeks ago. Back then I spoke of an ancient trust, on Burlington Island in the Delaware River. Swedes don’t get much attention for their colonial history in North America. The narrative generally focuses upon English, Spanish and French interests. Sometimes Dutch…

  • Prime Meridian Through Spain

    I noticed a query dropped upon the Twelve Mile Circle from one of the search engines. It was a fairly straight-forward request for information, as far as those things go. My anonymous visitor wanted to know about the “Madrid prime meridian line” Do we sense a problem? Where Does the Prime Meridian Go? The knee-jerk…

  • Abandoned Canals in Canada

    Generally I know exactly how I come up with each topic I hand-pick for Twelve Mile Circle articles. That’s not the case here. I don’t recall the exact sequence of steps that led to abandoned canals in Canada. Well, I understand the Canadian part. I figured it would be a smaller universe. Also it’s been…

  • Slices of Belgium

    Immigration and the fingerprints it leaves behind sometimes finds its way to Twelve Mile Circle as a topic of conversation. The legacy remains even after a successful assimilation and disbursement of the original population. I’m curious particularly about the smallest populations of settlers in new lands — and it might be difficult to get more…

  • History, Geography and Fitness

    Who could ever grow tired of this view? I haven’t although I do like a little scenic variation now-and-then. I have a pleasant 20-mile bicycle route I like to take that hugs the Potomac riverside, including this segment I described previously in Monumental Ride. From there I curve onto the former Washington & Old Dominion…

  • Captains Less Prestigious

    I had no trouble finding populated places named for Captain James Cook, the legendary 18th Century explorer and navigator, along the edges of the waters he sailed. However, plenty of other captains sailed the oceans during that same period. Naturally I wondered if the maps memorialized others similarly. Could I find other places named “Captain…

  • How Invasive

    I had a conversation recently with my friend the birder. He pointed out various bird species that happened to fly within line-of-site of our gathering, while noting which ones were native species and which ones were transplants. That led to discussions of various invasive animals introduced into North America either by accident or by design,…

  • Ancient Trust

    I seem to have a little bit of a river island fixation going on recently. I started with Green River Island and now I’m featuring Burlington Island (map). Even so, I think it’s probably just these two articles, a coincidence actually. Burlington doesn’t have quite the pedigree of a Supreme Court decision like Green River…