Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Tag: Illinois

  • Connecting Through Midway

    I hadn’t flown through Chicago’s Midway Airport much until recently. Then Southwest Airlines started offering flights at my local airport and many of its connections passed through Midway. I always hated connecting flights — and flying in general — although I admitted a preference for Midway over O’Hare. I never pondered its name though. Midway…

  • Last Place in the United States

    I decided to wrap-up the series of “Last Places” with the United States, after previously exploring England, Asia and various members of the Commonwealth of Nations. The premise remained the same, to find the last places in the nation where something once happened or where anachronisms still existed. The Last Arabbers Men known as Arabbers…

  • Oglala Lakota County

    I pointed out that the the Wade Hampton Census Area in Alaska became the Kusilvak Census Area in a recent Reader Mailbag article. Alaska’s census areas exists as a unique construct. They serve as a convenient parceling of the Unorganized Borough while being considered “county equivalents” by the Federal government for a number of statistical…

  • 81 on 81

    I’m planning a quick trip down to southwestern Virginia and neighboring West Virginia. Naturally I intend to count some new counties along the way although with other purposes too. I wish I could say it was entirely about the counties so I could finally finish Virginia. But that will have to wait for another day.…

  • Woonerf

    In some places they’re called complete streets, home zones or shared spaces. However, I preferred the original Dutch term “woonerf” (pronounced VONE-erf). It described a concept as old as urban civilization itself although applied within a new context. It follows a very simple idea, a notion of streets shared by everyone. That concept took a…

  • More Geo-BREWities

    My geography and brewery interests collided a few months ago. The happy result produced Geo-Brewities. Apparently Google says I own that term now, a pseudo-portmanteau of geography + brewery + oddities. I don’t expect it to become part of the popular lexicon. It’s not that catchy. Developing the List I took a different approach on…

  • Lockport

    The website hit came from Lockport, Illinois. Well, Lockport sounded familiar, although from a different time and place than Illinois. It also seemed quite descriptive, a lock on a canal combined with a port (or perhaps a portage). Locks would be ideal places for settlements during the heyday of canal travel a century or more…

  • Riverboat Adventure, Part 1 (The River)

    12MC is back! Thank you for bearing with me while I took a brief respite from posting new articles. There were logistical reasons. Each race in the five state series took much of the morning, then we’d have to drive to the next location (stopping at geo-oddity sites along the way), arrive late each afternoon,…

  • Beery Places

    It began as I discovered Beery Reservoir in northeastern Montana appearing on my screen (map). For once I decided to avoid overthinking the reference and have fun with it while wondering how awesome it would be to have a reservoir of beer. Don’t expect a lot of intellectual curiosity or historical background today, just beer-themed…

  • 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…