Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Tag: Border

  • Point Roberts – Stranded by an International Border

    Point Roberts, Washington cannot be reached by land from the rest of the United States. One must drive first into Canada, curve around Boundary Bay, and then cross the border again to re-enter the United States at this remote corner. The establishment of a border between the United States and Canada along the 49th parallel…

  • Bibb-Monroe Border War in Georgia

    I don’t know what’s going on in the minds of the citizenry of the State of Georgia. They just don’t seem comfortable within their borders lately. They’ve been tugging, pulling, cinching and stretching their ill-fitting suit, maybe hoping to address some ancient wrongs or remove old annoyances. Certainly, plenty of opportunities exist. They’ve had the…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Southwick Jog

    Follow the border between Connecticut and Massachusetts westward and you’ll notice a little notch in an otherwise straight line. Many call this 2-1/2 mile dip the Southwick Jog after the town that plugs the hole. The ultimate authority and definitive source is “The Southwick Jog” by Rev. Edward R. Dodge, as appearing in Southwick, Massachusetts…

  • Border Hunting Related Adventures

    I’d like to recommend a blog I ran across recently, Hugh’s Border Blog (“Border Hunting Related Adventures”). As regular readers of Twelve Mile Circle already know, borders, boundaries and divisions fascinate me to an unusual degree. That’s true whether they’re artificial or natural. Hugh seems to have the same interest, maybe even more so. He…

  • Cooch Behar Quadripoint Boundary Cross

    UPDATE: India and Bangladesh resolved this situation by exchanging territory and removing the exclaves in 2015. A quadripoint occurs when four borders meet at a single point. For example this happens in the United States at the “Four Corners“. There, the states of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado join together. In previous entries I’ve…

  • John Hardeman Walker’s Bootheel

    I sometimes wonder about unusually-shaped geopolitical boundaries. Sometimes I find it’s due to specific geographic features as with The Gambia. Other times it arises from territorial clashes as with the Temburong exclave of Brunei Darussalam. Generally speaking, the stranger the shape the better the story. So I got to wondering about the Missouri Bootheel. That’s…

  • South of Detroit

    Here’s an old one that most people probably already know, but I still enjoy it. What is the first foreign country you would reach if you traveled due south from Detroit, Michigan? Canada! A curve in the Detroit River, the narrow ribbon of water that joins Lake St. Clair to Lake Erie, creates a situation…

  • The Transpeninsular Line

    I’ve been traveling recently, in fact, I’ve been closer to the Twelve Mile Circle than I’ve been in quite some time. During those travels I was able to stop by the Transpeninsular Line. In this blog I discuss various odd geographic topics that happen to interest me. The Transpeninsular Line is certainly one of those.…