Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Tag: Illinois

  • 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…

  • The Resurrectionists

    There’s a reason why Twelve Mile Circle appears on the howderfamily.com domain. It began as a genealogy and family history site. 12MC started as a minor side project, an afterthought. I never abandoned the original purpose tough, even when my geo-oddities coverage grew exponentially more popular. A couple of weeks ago I stumbled upon a…

  • Move Along, Nothing to See Here

    The signs claimed “On this site in 1897 nothing happened.” It felt mildly amusing, maybe even a tiny bit clever the first time — the first time! — I saw one of their ilk several years ago. They mimicked the look-and-feel of genuine historical markers with faux cast iron, bold font, adorned with a couple…

  • Shortline

    That’s shortline (with a “t”) not shoreline. The term describes very small railroads. I first became aware of shortlines a couple of years ago when we took a brief trip to Vermont during early Autumn. One of our activities included an excursion along the western bank of the Connecticut River. We took that trip on…

  • Quad County Towns, Crowdsourced

    I knew I barely scratched the surface with Quad County Towns, a collection of municipalities that sprawled across the boundaries of four different counties. Examples were surprisingly difficult to find so I turned it over to the Twelve Mile Circle audience who quickly doubled my feeble efforts by appending comments. I hadn’t planned on writing…

  • Rapid Transit in 1844

    I’ve slowly been overhauling the non-12MC part of my website to upgrade to Google Maps API v3. That’s the portion for which I obtained the howderfamily.com domain long before Twelve Mile Circle became the tail wagging the dog. As part of that I revisited a genealogy page I wrote about ten years ago. It looked…

  • The Other Mount Vernon

    I posted an article a few days ago that I called The Other White House. I thought I was being rather topical by posting it on Presidents Day, featuring a bunch of White Houses that shared nothing in common with the famous one in Washington, DC except for a name. So I felt pretty smug,…

  • Super City

    Metropolis. The city where Superman hangs his cape. It’s a huge place on the order of New York or Chicago or somewhere of that magnitude. This is the image that comes to mind whenever I hear about Metropolis. Sure it’s also a renowned German movie from the silent film era. However, the Twelve Mile Circle…

  • Biggest Losers

    I’ve been playing around with the 2010 United States Census results by county again. This time I compared them to the previous decennial census conducted in 2000. This allows one to observe population shifts taking place over the prior decade. I tend to find more interest in the larger shifts, which is true I suppose…

  • Over the Road

    An image posted by reader Katy in a comment on my recent Tunnels, Bridges, Lifts and Inclines article completely captivated me. It shows a canal going over a road in the Netherlands. The interesting aspect, to me, is that a viewer can determine the actual depth of the canal. Highway engineers were kind enough to…