Tag: Union

  • Bogue Banks Bound, Part 4 (Conflicts)

    These areas near the coast were particularly valuable during a time when limited transportation options existed. Naturally new European arrivals settled there and built their towns. Even so, times were not always wonderful. Differing outlooks led to inevitable conflicts. Just as I’d discovered during my recent trip to South Carolina, military conflicts left their marks…

  • 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…

  • Overwhelming Union

    I thought Disunion Averted would be straightforward. Union City, Indiana was on one side of a state boundary and Union City, Ohio was on the other. Fortunately I could search on the Indiana location because the town in Ohio kept generating false positives. Search engines wanted to point me towards the City of Union instead.…

  • An Obscure Gettysburg

    This is the story of John Kennedy. No, not that John Kennedy! I’m referring to John Wright Kennedy who I guarantee that you know nothing about, nor should you. It’s about how a formative event in his life resulting in the naming of a town twenty years later. He was a farmer who underwent a…

  • Confederate Yankees

    The Confederate’s Army of Northern Virginia surrendered at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. That was essentially the end of the Civil War although others continued to fight briefly afterwards. The former Confederate states all regained representation in the United States Congress within the next few years. Eventually they all formally terminated their succession…

  • My Ridiculous Historic Parallel

    My interest in history is probably as great as my interest in geography. So naturally that’s a theme I’ve woven into Twelve Mile Circle quite regularly. Keeping that in mind, I’ve grown ever-excited as events commemorating the 150th anniversary of the U.S. Civil War approach. Activities will escalate rapidly on April 12, 2011 with the…

  • Adjacent Counties, Same Name, Different States

    We’ve had a lively interactive discussion within the comments section of the recent article, “For Aficionados of Counties.” This doesn’t surprise me. Many of our regular readers are indeed aficionados of counties. In fact I seem to have cornered a great deal of the market on geo-oddities at this tertiary level of US government, not…

  • Reconciliation

    I mentioned Brian Brown’s wonderful Vanishing South Georgia website previously as I explored leaf-vein patterns left behind by swamp drainage. Brian uses an interesting minimalist approach. It allows imagery to portray a wistful almost melancholy longing for a heritage slowly slipping away. He’s attempting to preserve it all visually before it decomposes back into the…

  • Antietam Topography

    I crossed the Potomac River on my way back from Shepherdstown, West Virginia, and drove into Sharpsburg, Maryland a few miles later, the site of the Battle of Antietam. I didn’t have a great deal of time for my visit but I was still able to stop at a few favorite spots within this well-known…

  • GPS and Genealogy – Arlington National Cemetery

    People’s willingness to share is one of the wonderful aspects of genealogy. A reader contacted me recently to provide further information about a common tangential ancestor — one not directly related to either of us but who had married into the larger family of Howder descendants — and for whom I’d had only the sketchiest…