Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: Cities/Towns

  • Colonial Colleges

    I made a passing reference to the Colonial Colleges of the United States recently in King’s College Tract. There are over four thousand colleges and universities in the U.S. that award degrees today. But only nine of them — the so-called Colonial Colleges — acquired a charter before the United States gained independence. So I…

  • Deadly Fog

    I was thinking recently about a huge multi-vehicle accident that happened in Virginia a few months ago. That one involved 77 vehicles in thick fog. Of course it was a terrible tragedy that I wouldn’t wish on anybody. It also made me wonder whether it was the worst possible, or whether there were others even…

  • King’s College Tract

    I came across a tiny, minor footnote as I researched Yankee Doodle Dunce, an account of allegedly independent nations that joined the United States. This story involved Vermont specifically. The situation occurred within the confusing, overlapping New York royal decrees and New Hampshire Grants. The turmoil of the American Revolutionary War further compounded the situation.…

  • 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…

  • Completely Random

    I happened to pop onto the 12MC Clustr Map as I like to do occasionally because I’m strange like that and I enjoy watching visitor statistics in real time, and a certain placename caught my eye: Random Lake, Wisconsin. It seemed — and you knew where I’d take this — so incredibly random. “Where do…

  • Plank Roads

    I used to drive between Washington, DC and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, nearly every weekend for about eighteen months a number of years ago. I became very familiar with the route and every landmark placed upon it as one might imagine. One of those included an exit for Boydton Plank Road along Interstate 85 near…

  • 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.…

  • Disunion Averted

    Eventually I get around to things. Many months ago, December 2012 to be precise, loyal reader “Joe” commented on an article. However, don’t confuse him with that other Loyal Reader Joe (a.k.a. Spammy Joe). Anyway, I called that original article “Short Distance Namesakes” for towns in close proximity sharing a name independently. He mentioned the…

  • Once a Capital

    It must be depressing I considered, to live in a former capital city. Once it served as the centerpiece of a sovereign nation, a focus of governance, a diplomatic hub, and now maybe only a provincial power or possibly much worse. I wondered what the saddest case might be, the one that fell the farthest…

  • Loess

    What do Council Bluffs, Iowa, the Battle of Vicksburg and the Yellow River all have in common? Loess. Loess comes from the German löß, and has a common root with the English word, loose. This geological term describes a light silty dust blown by the wind that accumulates into thick layers and hills. These deposits,…