Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Tag: Cincinnati

  • Outside of California

    I spotted a town in Maryland called California. I’d known about it for awhile. It always seemed odd to have a town in one state named for another, especially one located an entire continent away. So I figured there must be a connection somewhere in there. Maybe it had roots in the California Gold Rush…

  • Catbird Seat

    “In the catbird seat” is an idiomatic expression in the United States. But is that true anywhere else? I don’t know. Essentially it means “a position of great prominence or advantage” (Merriam-Webster). Regardless, this was a rather unusual expression. What exactly did it mean, I wondered for so many years. Even so I never considered…

  • Reader Mailbag

    This is a rather special edition in a long series of intermittent Odds and Ends articles. I will call it Reader Mailbag for the obvious reason. Yes, comments, emails and tweets from Twelve Mile Circle readers inspired this one more than anything else. These topics were all completely unknown to me previously. So maybe I…

  • Canal Becomes Subway

    I wrote about Abandoned Canals in Canada several months ago. That then prompted a comment from loyal 12MC reader Bill Harris. He noted an unusual re-purposing of an abandoned canal across the border in the United States. Specifically he referenced a portion of the Erie Canal that originally flowed through downtown Rochester, NY (part of…

  • International Latitude Observatories

    I came across an interesting building while researching the Gaithersburg Doughnut Hole a few months ago. It’s just to the east of the hole by a couple of streets, so more accurately it’s just barely on the doughnut, perhaps it’s a coconut sprinkle. Here’s how it appears in a public domain photograph: It looks rather…

  • Twelve Mile House

    I get a lot of people looking for “Twelve Mile” places on this site. Naturally we should expect that for a site named Twelve Mile Circle. Sometimes it leads to amazing discovers like the Twelve Mile 500, the preeminent professional lawnmower race anywhere on the planet. Other times it leads to dead ends. So it…