Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • That Recurring State Line

    A random Twelve Mile Circle reader became an unwitting inspiration for this article simply because of where he or she lived. The little dot within Idaho on my Google Analytics dashboard mentioned State Line. That seemed too good to be true. I’ve done plenty of articles about border towns although I’d never noticed that one…

  • Adjacent Tree Towns

    While looking at a map recently I noticed two curious towns in Wisconsin. Their names seemed perfectly fine and normal, Poplar and Maple. Their proximity seemed more than a little coincidental. I never found an explanation for collocated tree towns and the pattern didn’t extend to other settlements in Douglas County. Nonetheless, I felt a…

  • That’s a Wrap

    Finally, 2016 ended. That’s a wrap. Then I went down a little tangent wondering about that particular expression. Fortunately there were sources such as the late William Safire who explored That’s/It’s a Wrap in 2005. It did refer to the movie industry as I believed although of more recent vintage than I imagined, perhaps dating…

  • Ladysmith

    A few weeks ago I wrote about Triangle, a name on a road sign that I pondered as I sat stuck in traffic on a drive back from Richmond, Virginia. I also noticed another exit on that fateful trip as I slogged through miles of gridlock. The sign said Ladysmith and my mind began to…

  • Merry Christmas

    A Merry Christmas to everyone reading Twelve Mile Circle who celebrates the day. A Happy Holiday or well wishes to everyone else as well. Every once in awhile the 12MC publishing schedule falls directly on Christmas. So a Christmas theme felt appropriate even with a diminished audience. Ironically, most people with enough time to read…

  • Crystal City

    Familiar place names always catch my attention. Often they share a bond with locations near my home in the Washington, DC area. Several years ago I wrote about one such situation in A Tale of Three Ridges. This time Crystal City served as the common denominator. Crystal City, Virginia Virginia’s Crystal City abuts Ronald Reagan…

  • Better Geographic Portmanteaus

    Longtime readers of Twelve Mile Circle know that I love a good portmanteau, the smooshing together of two distinct words to form a new word that combines their meaning. These occur geographically too. My favorite examples involve the adjacent towns of Mexicali and Calexico on the border between Mexico and the U.S. state of California.…

  • Ends of Canada

    My Ends of the Earth wandering reminded me of an earlier Google Street View quest. A long time ago, way back in 2010, Twelve Mile Circle included an article I called The Shack at the End of the Road. This marked the northernmost extreme of Street View coverage in Canada at that time. I wondered…

  • Ends of the Earth

    I revisited an old concept from a much earlier version of Twelve Mile Circle, the simple pleasure of wandering aimlessly through Google Street View. That’s something I used to enjoy regularly. However, life got busier and other priorities mostly prevented that luxury in recent years. They still do, although I needed to clear my mind…

  • Centers of Michigan

    For once I wasn’t looking for the geographic center of something, as problematic as that could be given various definitions. Not in Michigan. And for the record, the town of St. Louis claimed to be the “middle of the mitten.” Even so, this moves to a spot a few miles north-northwest of Cadillac taking the…

Latest Comments

  1. That was its original range before people spread it all around. Now it’s in lots of different places, including Oklahoma.

  2. I think that range needs to be expanded greatly. I’m in the Oklahoma City area and those are fairly prevalent…

  3. The law in the 1800s when most of the countries was being broke down into smaller one stated that you…

  5. Hi Mr. Howder — Just going from memory, I recall that your “rule” for counting a nation/state/county is “if I’m…