Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • Google Street View Comes to Washington, DC Area (finally!)

    I’m about a week late, but I did notice when I went into Google Maps recently that the Washington, DC area has finally been added to Street View. I’d been grousing about it for awhile and thought it might never happen. This was a long time coming. Witnesses spotted the photo car in the District…

  • Caribbean Ferries

    Regular readers have gotten used to my unnatural fascination with, and periodic musings about ferries. I’ve been slowly cataloging and mapping ferry systems from around the world using the Google Maps API. The operative word being slowly. I’m finally ready to release the latest compilation. Ferries of the Caribbean (and beyond). Check it out! This…

  • The Twelve Mile Circle, Part II

    An arc-shaped portion of the border between Delaware and Pennsylvania serves as the most visible manifestation of the so-called Twelve Mile Circle, as noted in the previous entry. However other impacts can also be discerned. The oddity also effects the Delaware – New Jersey boundary, albeit less visibly. Refer back to the map again and…

  • The Twelve Mile Circle, Part I

    Today marks the one-year Anniversary of this website, Twelve Mile Circle. However I’ve yet to explain the actual Twelve Mile Circle behind the name. I promised myself I would do so if I could keep this site active for a year, and I’ve now met that goal. So here goes. As many regular readers already…

  • A Colonial Capital

    I spent some of last week on business travel to Williamsburg, Virginia. Unfortunately I sat in a conference room for most of the time. However, I did manage to make it out to the historic sites for a few brief moments. Geography made Williamsburg the capital of the Virginia Colony and geography later took that…

  • Halloween Spots

    It’s Halloween here in the United States, so for a little fun today let’s feature some geography that fits within that spooky theme. One of the more obvious choices would be Salem, Massachusetts, site of the famous witch trials in 1692-1693. Over 150 people were imprisoned for witchcraft, with nineteen accused victims hanged and one…

  • Sticking it to the Man (border style)

    In recent posts I’ve listed examples of state and local governments leveraging the geography of their physical borders. They’ve generated tax revenue from outsiders who had no electoral standing to challenge it. For instance, I discussed situations found in the Southwick Jog of Massachusetts and the interstate highway traveling through northern Delaware. However, every once…

  • Delaware’s Border Tax

    Recently I featured the Southwick Jog, a little appendage of Massachusetts that juts into the northern tier of Connecticut. Then a reader brought a recent article in the Hartford Courant to my attention. Geographically, the town of Southwick in Massachusetts includes the entirety of Congamond Lake within its boundaries. So it intends to levy fees…

  • Vermont: Another border anomaly. Sort of?

    Various small locations in the United States connect to the North American continent but do not physically connect to the rest of the U.S. Two of those spots require people to clear immigration and customs and then enter Canada. Then they do it all over again in reverse to gain access to the small parcel.…

  • The Point of Five Nevis Parishes

    I’ve been on a border kick lately. You may have noticed that if you’ve been paying attention to the last several of posts. Quite some time ago I described a situation in Florida. There, five counties came together at a single point in the middle of Lake Okeechobee. Now something a little more dramatic: five…

Latest Comments

  4. Osage Orange trees are fairly common in Northern Delaware. I assumed they were native plants. As kids we definitely called…

  5. Enough of them in Northern Delaware that they don’t stand out at all until the fruit drops in the fall.…