Category: Roads
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Heartland, Part 3 (Foiled by Memorial Day)
I figured I’d have to give this article a sneaky title or nobody would read it. Once again I decided to focus a portion of my journey on local breweries and brewpubs found along our route. These posts tend to underperform as some of the least popular items on Twelve Mile Circle. I know that…
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Heartland, Part 1 (Why, oh Why?)
Here we go again! I just finished a drive through the Midwest, all the way to Iowa and back, and returned on Saturday. We didn’t stay anywhere for very long and kept moving most of the time. We also stayed in different hotels for seven of the eight nights, and covered about 2,200 miles (3,500…
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Dallas Park Cooperative Housing
Twelve Mile Circle posted an article I titled Mutual Ownership Defense Housing in January 2014. It focused on a little-known unit of the of the United States government’s Federal Works Agency. This resulted in eight housing developments constructed between 1940 and 1942. Seven of them thrived. However the eighth seemed lost to history, a place…
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Any Excuse for a Road Trip, Part 2 (Short Haul)
Now I needed to execute my ambitious plan, a long weekend drive that would result in my capture of 24 previously unvisited counties. Friday, the first day, covered fewer miles than Saturday or Sunday. However, I made up for that shorter distance with plenty of sightseeing activities. I’d never traveled between St. Louis and Cape…
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Any Excuse for a Road Trip, Part 1 (The Premise)
People following Twelve Mile Circle’s Twitter account knew something must be happening. Suddenly tweets tagged to places like Ste. Genevieve and Cape Girardeau in Missouri began to appear on my feed just before Easter. I hadn’t announced the trip ahead of time although I’d been planning it for several weeks. I’ve been aiding and abetting…
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More Oddities from Independent Cities, Part 2
Virginia’s independent cities continued to offer their peculiar geographic secrets. The earlier part of this series explored tendrils and quadripoints. However, other strange features hid within their twisted layouts. I turned my attention to enclaves and pinches next. Those unusual features probably came from heated negotiations between cities and counties during drawn-out annexation hearings. In…
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What the Cove?
What does someone call a short street with only a single outlet to a larger street? I wondered because I found different terms that varied geographically. There seemed to be a cultural dimension to it as well. Certain suffixes seemed to be more prevalent in the United Kingdom and others in the United States, with…
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Marking the Meridian
A random one-time reader landed on Twelve Mile Circle recently. That unknown visitor sought information about the Prime Meridian, and I’ll get to the specific request in a moment. I know I’ve discussed this meridian before. However, in searching my archives and after examining the Complete Index I discovered that I’d never actually marked the…
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Mr. Walker’s Island Adventure
It didn’t take much to get me started on another obsessive-compulsive exercise. Longtime reader Rhodent commented on my observations about a stalker on St. Martin’s Island (map) in Bangladesh. That made me even more curious about the underlying situation. So I needed to check every single image in painstaking detail to see if I could…
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Tenaha, Timpson, Bobo, and Blair
During deep winter I focus a lot of efforts on my genealogy hobby. I think it’s because the holidays offer big blocks of time where I’m stuck indoors. I can concentrate on intricate details as I piece together my family puzzle. Recently a line of research brought my attention to a small town in East…