Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • Optimization in Process

    The experiment to provide the entire content of each article to the RSS feed seems to have worked based on user feedback. I will be conducting further optimization and improvements over the weekend, too. There might be a short period of dead links, etc., as I switch some of the settings that should make this…

  • Free the Feed!

    Since I started the Twelve Mile Circle in November 2007, I’ve kept the RSS (“really simple syndication”) feed, well, really simple. I’ve used a WordPress option that truncates the feed into an abbreviated form that transmits maybe the first two or three sentences of each article. Today I’ve decided to Free the Feed and send…

  • Half-Breed Tract

    My hobbies sometimes run together. That happened again as I searched an 1896 land ownership map for Wabasha County, Minnesota. There I hoped to find the footprints of a peripheral ancestor. I knew the Nineteenth Century property ownership existed, in fact I’d visited the site in person. However, I’d never seen this particular vintage map…

  • Great White North(ish)

    I came across another wonderful map as I reviewed the Dead Tree Media over the weekend. The City of Toronto bought a full-page advertisement hoping to entice tourists from the northeast United States to cross the border into Canada for a weekend or a few days. They presented several lighthearted graphics designed to attract the…

  • 100th Meridian Initiative

    The meridian line 100° west of Greenwich, England, often called simply the 100th Meridian, divides roughly the eastern side of North America from the west. This happens both geographically and culturally. So it cuts directly through the Great Plains in the United States. It goes down the middle of North and South Dakota, through Nebraska,…

  • Looking for Kenai Geo-Oddities

    I’ll be on the Kenai Peninsula of southern Alaska in about two weeks. I have a pretty good handle on most of the tourist stuff: hiking, salmon fishing, bear watching, whale sighting and glacier hopping. What I’m hoping is that the vast select and discerning audience of the Twelve Mile Circle may have some advice…

  • Kenora, So Far Away

    Many months ago, in what seems like a lifetime ago in the world of Twelve Mile Circle, I focused on rural Southwestern Virginia. I demonstrated through a simple mapping design that one distant corner of the state was closer to the capitals of eight other states than to its own capital of Richmond. This was…

  • Mount Pearl Mystery

    Why do I get such a disproportional number of visitors from Mount Pearl? It’s just a random small city in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. So is there something on Twelve Mile Circle that resonates with its 25,000 residents? Or does a small number of amazingly dedicated 12MC fans happen to live there? I am sure…

  • Spike House for Sale — Only $1.5 Million

    People who manage property consolidations refer to a single landowner who resists all purchasing offers as a “spike.” The lone holdout can sometimes spike a complicated deal single-handedly to the detriment of surrounding landowners hoping to profit, and developers trying to assemble a large enough parcel to justify an apartment building, office complex or shopping…

  • Flipping Lat/Long Directions – The Map

    The skills of the people who read Twelve Mile Circle continuously impress me. I love their ability to expand upon a theme I’ve presented, and their willingness to share the results of their efforts with other readers. Today it’s wonderful to post a map produced by “Colin”. He uses my Flipping Lat/Long Directions article as…

Latest Comments

  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…