Category: Cities/Towns
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Dueling Portmanteau Placenames
My recent article on Mexican borders visible on Street View reminded me of a situation that’s long fascinated me. It came to the forefront as I viewed this image: Can you find the border in this image? Sure you can. That’s a silly question. Calexico vs. Mexicali The rural area north of this amazingly stark…
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Geo-Oddities of Portland, Oregon
Every once in awhile I’m honored to share content or even an entire guest post written by a loyal Twelve Mile Circle reader. We are very lucky today. Marc Alifanz contributes his expert knowledge of Geo-oddities in Portland, Oregon. Marc is an experienced blogger both in his professional and personal life and as he demonstrates…
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12 Mile Circ… no wait, 16!
[UPDATE: 16 Mile Brewing Company CLOSED in September 2018] Look at the bottle my wife brought home from the grocery store a few days ago. Can you see the name of the brewery on the bottle? That’s the 16 Mile Brewing Company. More importantly, the brewery is located in Delaware. Now, I’ve heard of a…
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Historic Fort Lincoln
Most of you will probably want to skip down a bit and start reading at the map. Longtime readers may remember when I went down to Texas for my grandmother’s 100th birthday party. Well, sorrowfully Bernice Sylvester McGaughy passed away a few days ago. She was 102 years old and in good health both physically…
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Tourist Options During a Government Shutdown
The benefit or the curse of living in the Washington, DC area — and the jury is still out on that call — is that national and international news for everyone else is our local news. Currently we can’t escape the theatrics of yet another impending government shutdown. Here’s to hoping that the immature politicians…
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In Them Old Cotton Fields
Little did reader Ian Dunbar realize that he struck a nerve when he commented on the Bordersplit article. It had nothing to do with his fine words or sentiment. I was in total agreement. Glaring geographical errors in songs grate on my nerves too. My nemesis happens to be a completely different musical composition but…
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Random Canadian
The pursuit of geo-oddities is a passion of mine, but not my only one. History, and by extension personal history (genealogy) is another. Sometimes the two intertwine. I’ve long known of a family line tangential to mine that associated with the early history of Canadian, Texas (map). Their involvement began with the founding of Canadian…
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Erasing Van Buren
Political debates come and go. What happens, however, when people live in a place named after a politician they despise? That doesn’t happen very often anymore. Just about every geographic location got its name a long time ago, at least in the United States. The nation expanded furiously in the first half of the Nineteenth…
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Low Clearance
I’ve seen an unusual website mentioned on several aggregator and blogging websites called 11foot8.com. I’m sure that some of you’ve seen it too and it probably doesn’t need much introduction. It features an 11 foot 8 inch (3.56 metre) overpass on Gregson Street in Durham, North Carolina that has the propensity to peel the tops…
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Vulnerable to Invasion
All our talk of invasions, mostly imagined, got me thinking. What about the actual invasions of the United States? Oceans on either side certainly limited the possibilities and reduced the number of occurrences to a mere handful. So how many times have invaders assaulted the United States? As with much we discuss on the Twelve…