Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Tag: Georgia

  • Saint Marys River

    I’ve certainly noticed Florida’s northeastern bump above Jacksonville, and then the Georgia dip just to the west, both of which contrast with their generally straight remaining border. Sure, we’ve all seen it before and taken note of it. The meandering border through that segment follows the St. Marys River that rises from the depths of…

  • Full Name Counties

    Almost exactly a year ago, 12MC published Jeff Davis, a treatise on the use of the Confederate leader’s full name as a geographic identifier at the county level of government. Davis County wasn’t a good enough name for some of those deeply-Southern states. No, it had to be Jeff Davis or the more formal Jefferson…

  • Label Me Elmo

    I’ll display Elmo one final time, just like in Counterintuitive Saints, even though this article will have absolutely nothing to do with Sesame Street. Why? Because that’s what 12MC wants to do at the moment. How often does one get to feature Elmo? I should probably recap some other salient points from the earlier article…

  • Georgia’s Enigma

    A couple of earlier topics conglomerated conceptually in my mind to create my recent fascination with the U.S. state of Georgia’s Enigma. I discovered Enigma — it’s an actual town in Georgia that has about 1,200 residents — as I researched Shaped Like it Sounds (Street Edition). Enigma contained an Ell Street, which indeed resembled…

  • DeKalb

    DeKalb felt like such an odd choice for a relatively common place name in the United States. I’d seen it a number of times in various widely-distributed locations over the years. I’d pondered its pronunciation which generally seemed to sound like dee-KAB with a silent L. So, naturally I wondered about its origin. It didn’t…

  • Finding the Original Purpose

    I’m always on the lookout for unusual trivia. For example, something stuck in my mind a couple of years ago when I learned about the Augusta Canal. Logically it’s located in Augusta, Georgia, but that’s not what mattered. There was another claim that took a variety of forms. So I put that one on the…

  • Georgia Capitals

    I have a soft spot for promising places now obscured. They might have been famous if history had unfolded just a little bit differently. Maybe not everyone thinks that way. Hopefully the topic appeals to a few of you anyway because that’s what this article offers. I think it was about a year ago that…

  • Goin’ Down to Garland

    I stumbled upon an old thread on the Straight Dope message boards discussing the naming of streets. Responsible parties included the usual cast of characters such as developers, county governments, planning commissions, city councils, working-level bureaucrats, and the like. One contributor on that message board mentioned that: “Several years ago, I was working with a…

  • Triple Letter

    An unwary visitor arriving on the Twelve Mile Circle through some random search once again provided fodder for an article topic. The query forwarded by search software said: “name of the county, state and cities starts with s?” Usually this means someone is trying to complete an online geography contest or perhaps an old-school crossword…

  • Quad County Towns

    I mentioned Braselton, Georgia a few months ago in an article called “Bought the Town.” In that case the person who bought the town was the actress Kim Basinger who later sold her interest for a stunning financial loss. More interestingly, I noted, the town boundaries included a county quadripoint. Braselton sprawled across Barrow, Gwinnett,…