Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • X Marks the Spot

    It occurs to me how few place names begin with the letter X. I’ll admit that lots of places in China and other portions of the world do. However, those names derive from another language and gain their X during translation. I believe we need to distinguish the set of names converted from foreign logographic…

  • Carbon

    I noticed an interesting theme in a small town in Eastland County, Texas. Carbon, population 224, seems dedicated to all things carbon as befitting its name. Check out its fascinating array of streets featuring carbon in various allotropes, primarily although not exclusively in the form of coal and its derivatives. Carbon-themed streets I found: Coal…

  • Damfino

    I received an interesting tip by email about an old street in San Antonio, Texas identified as “Damfino” (as in “Damn if I know”). Our reader even provided a copy of an 1885 map for the online Library of Congress collection, which I’ve excerpted below. He theorized that the street name may have been a…

  • Studios to Towns

    I began to sense a pattern as I examined a map of Los Angeles, California recently. The movie industry has left its fingerprints upon the names of various places scattered throughout the basin and into the San Fernando Valley. This doesn’t surprise me, I’ve just never noticed it before. Let’s make sure we have the…

  • Loyal Reader Joe

    Those of you expecting a geography topic may be a bit disappointed with this article. Feel free to jump down directly to the “totally unrelated” section or return in a couple of days when I get back to the usual content. Today I diverge completely to another one of my favorite topics, my ongoing battle…

  • Proof! West Coast Sunrise over Water

    I mentioned Mathew Hargreaves’ achievement a few weeks ago. He was the reader who undertook a two-year effort to document a genuine West Coast Sunrise over Water. He described his efforts as they unfolded in a series of comments on that earlier article. We speculated that one might be able to witness this unusual geo-oddity…

  • European Capitals of New York

    New York is certainly an international locale, a player on the world stage attracting people from every corner of the world. It has been that way for a long time, a point of debarkation for more than two centuries. Perhaps I should expect to see the names of so many European capitals diffused within the…

  • My Little Poni

    I completed my annual business trip to Williamsburg, Virginia earlier this week. I’ve featured articles arising from these periodic visits in the past including A Colonial Capital, The Jamestown-Scotland Ferry and Revisiting the Swap. I felt like I’d mined that area rather extensively. I had no plans to report anything further. Something made me smile…

  • Rocky Mountain High

    One would be tempted to think that I’m a huge fan of the late John Denver given that I’ve featured his signature performances not once, but now a second time. I have a rather neutral feeling for his body of work, actually. His songs don’t inspire me but they don’t repel me either; they’re simply……

  • Sundog

    I mentioned Goldfield, Nevada recently. There I noticed a street called Sundog Avenue that looked like the kind of place where one could experience a sundog in person. Then I tucked the thought away for a few days until I had more time to explore it. A sundog describes a specific atmospheric condition that allows…

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  2. what is the total population that lives now in the land given back to Virginia should it be part of…

  5. Park ranger at Chalmette (New Orleans) Battlefield let me pull up the Union Jack 20 years ago. My dad would…