Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Author: Twelve Mile Circle

  • More Fill in Millard

    I noticed an anomaly as I pulled together the spreadsheet of every county named for a U.S. president for the recent Last Presidential Counties article. There was a single Millard County. It represented the only county designated for a president’s first name rather than his surname. Well, as far as I could determine. It got…

  • Reader Mailbag 3

    Twelve Mile Circle finds itself with an overflowing mailbag once again with lots of intriguing readers suggestions. Each one of these could probably form an entire article. However, I’ll provide the short versions today to try to clear the backlog. Once again, I’ll say gladly that 12MC has the best readers. I really appreciate learning…

  • Lover’s Leap

    A photograph and a quote used on the recent Hot Springs article referenced Lover’s Leap in Hot Springs, North Carolina. Twelve Mile Circle has noticed numerous other Lovers’ Leaps over the years. So then I wondered. In all of those dozens of examples, had there ever been a verifiable case where an actual lover leapt?…

  • Hot Springs Everywhere

    Twelve Mile Circle has featured hot springs before. There was Hot Springs, Virginia in Taking a Bath. There was Hot Springs County, Wyoming and its county seat of Thermopolis in The Largest Smallest US County. Geothermal activities existed in many places and I’d taken notice plenty of times. Nonetheless it mildly surprised me when I…

  • Nearly Nothing Named for Nixon

    I joked as I wrote More Presidential County Sorting that nobody will ever name a county for disgraced former U.S. President Richard Milhous Nixon who resigned in 1974 in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. That led me to wonder, well, had anyone ever named anything for him? Maybe I was being overly harsh? Actually…

  • More Presidential County Sorting

    I found one surprising benefit to the tedious research that went into the recent Last Presidential Counties article. Now I could sort through the data differently and come up with several unexpected yet equally fascinating facts. It produced enough material for a second article. But don’t think of these as leftovers! They stand on their…

  • Last Presidential Counties

    Reader Steve Spivey contacted Twelve Mile Circle and floated an idea about U.S. counties named for presidents. He’d traveled through Taylor County in Georgia and recalled a Taylor County in Florida. Could they be related? Well yes, they bore the name of the 12th President of the United States, Zachary Taylor. That led him to…

  • Half of Something is Better Than Nothing

    Would Twelve Mile Circle stoop so low as to devote an entire article to a bad pun? Well yes, I’ve gone there before. The Operative Phrase Non-native English speakers in the audience deserve an explanation in advance. When something is said to be half-assed it implies that the effort used to produce it was insufficient,…

  • Easiest New England

    Twelve Mile Circle has received a steady drip of visitors who seem to want to know the shortest automobile route that could be taken to touch all of the New England states. I don’t see these queries every day. However, they comprise a consistent two or three every month-or-so and they have been landing on…

  • It’s Not Always About Abe

    In the United States, twenty-three states have a Lincoln County (or a Parish in the case of Louisiana). That’s nearly half. We should expect that. Certainly a man who led the nation through a traumatic civil war and who died tragically at the hand of an assassin deserved numerous place named for him. Geographic features…