Category: Water
-
Centers of Michigan
For once I wasn’t looking for the geographic center of something, as problematic as that could be given various definitions. Not in Michigan. And for the record, the town of St. Louis claimed to be the “middle of the mitten.” Even so, this moves to a spot a few miles north-northwest of Cadillac taking the…
-
Newsworthy River Cutoffs
Rivers can make great boundaries when they cooperate. Frequently they do not. These creatures of nature flow where they want to flow. Sometimes they erode deep furrows through solid rock, changing course only after eons pass. Other times they cross alluvial plains, shifting into multiple ephemeral streams simply awaiting the next flood. Problems will undoubtedly…
-
Misplaced Romans
The Geographic Names Information System listed 94 populated places in the United States called Rome. I figured maybe some should exist in other nations that created a bunch of new places around that same time period. Alas, I didn’t find any such places in Canada, South Africa, Australia or New Zealand. Why Rome seemed so…
-
Directional West Virginia
I spent the last several articles talking about West Virginia so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to add one more. The introductory post mentioned the oddly named West Virginia Northern Community College. Could I find places in West Virginia that represented each of the four cardinal directions? I guess I could have picked a different…
-
Counting West Virginia, Day 4 (Oddities)
Every trip seems to end too quickly. We soon hit the final leg of our northern West Virginia odyssey and headed home. Two uncaptured counties remained on the itinerary, Taylor and Tucker. They formed doughnut holes on my map and they needed to be removed. Oh, how I hated those little white splotches. That completely…
-
Counting West Virginia, Day 2 (Progress)
The rain that began the previous afternoon continued all night. It lifted, however, just as we began the first full day of our adventure. I probably would have headed to Pittsburgh’s two famous funiculars, the Duquesne Incline and the Monongahela Incline had I been alone. However I had my older son with me so I…
-
Presidential Layers
Twelve Mile Circle discovered quite the layering of Presidential place names recently, completely by accident. I tried to find a better example during the larger part of an afternoon and never came close. Someone from the audience should feel free to post a comment with better results. Washington State George Washington as the first President…
-
Venice of Whatever
I kept running into places that compared themselves to Venice as I uncovered canal superlatives. Literally dozens of places described themselves that way. It made things easy for Twelve Mile Circle too. I could select whatever examples I wanted today because I couldn’t possibly cover them all. That seemed like an excellent opportunity to create…
-
On Canals
In Latin, the word canna means reed, the root of canalis meaning “water pipe, groove, [or] channel.” The French language retained this term as it evolved from Latin, and the English language adopted it to describe a pipe for transporting liquid. This transformed to its modern English usage by the Seventeenth Century to represent an…
-
Weather or Not
Several places named Hurricane — all found far from a coastline — interested me a few weeks ago. From there I wrote a simple article I called Inland Hurricane. I also wondered if the same peculiarity extended to other weather phenomena so I began to search some more. I found mixed results. Even so I…