Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • Plank Roads

    I used to drive between Washington, DC and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, nearly every weekend for about eighteen months a number of years ago. I became very familiar with the route and every landmark placed upon it as one might imagine. One of those included an exit for Boydton Plank Road along Interstate 85 near…

  • Overwhelming Union

    I thought Disunion Averted would be straightforward. Union City, Indiana was on one side of a state boundary and Union City, Ohio was on the other. Fortunately I could search on the Indiana location because the town in Ohio kept generating false positives. Search engines wanted to point me towards the City of Union instead.…

  • Disunion Averted

    Eventually I get around to things. Many months ago, December 2012 to be precise, loyal reader “Joe” commented on an article. However, don’t confuse him with that other Loyal Reader Joe (a.k.a. Spammy Joe). Anyway, I called that original article “Short Distance Namesakes” for towns in close proximity sharing a name independently. He mentioned the…

  • Make a Bee Line

    I noticed an historical record that mentioned a late 19th Century railroad, the Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati and Indianapolis Railway. That’s not what interested me though, it was the railroad’s nickname, the “Bee Line” What a wonderful name for a railway. I considered it a nice play on words aligning with the idiom “to make a…

  • Once a Capital

    It must be depressing I considered, to live in a former capital city. Once it served as the centerpiece of a sovereign nation, a focus of governance, a diplomatic hub, and now maybe only a provincial power or possibly much worse. I wondered what the saddest case might be, the one that fell the farthest…

  • Comedy Duos

    It may be reasonable to assume that most people have at least a passing familiarity with Abbott and Costello’s signature Who’s-on-First comedy routine, developed in the late 1930’s. I referenced a possible Who’s-on-First scenario recently in No Way! Way! thinking that most readers would understand the reference. It came from an era long before I…

  • Yankee Doodle Dunce

    My recent long weekend at the in-laws provided plenty of downtime, which is a good thing. However, I’m also one of those people who has to do something at all times. Luckily they always have a stack of magazines — remember those quaint periodic booklets printed on actual paper? And I had plenty of time…

  • Loess

    What do Council Bluffs, Iowa, the Battle of Vicksburg and the Yellow River all have in common? Loess. Loess comes from the German löß, and has a common root with the English word, loose. This geological term describes a light silty dust blown by the wind that accumulates into thick layers and hills. These deposits,…

  • Odds and Ends 8

    I have a slew of short topics not befitting an entire article on their own. That means it’s time for another installment of Odds and Ends. Non-Native English Readers of 12MC Twelve Mile Circle receives a robust amount of website traffic from readers in nations where English is neither a predominant nor an official language.…

  • Tombolo(s) of Connecticut

    I have an odd affinity for tombolos. I don’t know why. It’s completely irrational. Even one of the earliest Twelve Mile Circle articles focused on the phenomenon. I’ll stick with a definition I drafted back then and quote myself. “A Tombolo is a narrow neck of land that forms between the mainland and an island,…

Latest Comments

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

  5. Does anyone have actual music to the song – Tanaha ,Timpson. Bobo and Blair ?? It was recorded by Tex…