Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • Delaware’s Border Tax

    Recently I featured the Southwick Jog, a little appendage of Massachusetts that juts into the northern tier of Connecticut. Then a reader brought a recent article in the Hartford Courant to my attention. Geographically, the town of Southwick in Massachusetts includes the entirety of Congamond Lake within its boundaries. So it intends to levy fees…

  • Vermont: Another border anomaly. Sort of?

    Various small locations in the United States connect to the North American continent but do not physically connect to the rest of the U.S. Two of those spots require people to clear immigration and customs and then enter Canada. Then they do it all over again in reverse to gain access to the small parcel.…

  • The Point of Five Nevis Parishes

    I’ve been on a border kick lately. You may have noticed that if you’ve been paying attention to the last several of posts. Quite some time ago I described a situation in Florida. There, five counties came together at a single point in the middle of Lake Okeechobee. Now something a little more dramatic: five…

  • Southwick Jog

    Follow the border between Connecticut and Massachusetts westward and you’ll notice a little notch in an otherwise straight line. Many call this 2-1/2 mile dip the Southwick Jog after the town that plugs the hole. The ultimate authority and definitive source is “The Southwick Jog” by Rev. Edward R. Dodge, as appearing in Southwick, Massachusetts…

  • Neutral Moresnet

    All this recent talk on Twelve Mile Circle about strange European borders and condominium arrangements brings me to one of my favorite former anomalies: Neutral Moresnet. This place existed as somewhat of a no-man’s-land lodged firmly between sovereign neighbors from 1816 to 1920. Europe looked different as Napoleon’s empire dissolved. The victors negotiated amongst themselves…

  • Condominium (not that kind)

    A condominium is a concept in international law that describes a geographic area shared in equal sovereignty by two nations. As a practical matter, it creates a genuinely unusual and often impractical solution. A condominium isn’t distinctly part of any one nation but by agreement it’s within the control of both. So it has no…

  • Border Hunting Related Adventures

    I’d like to recommend a blog I ran across recently, Hugh’s Border Blog (“Border Hunting Related Adventures”). As regular readers of Twelve Mile Circle already know, borders, boundaries and divisions fascinate me to an unusual degree. That’s true whether they’re artificial or natural. Hugh seems to have the same interest, maybe even more so. He…

  • The Erie Triangle

    If one ponders a map of the United State’s and focuses on one of its four Commonwealths, specifically Pennsylvania, one will notice something a bit odd with its borders. The northern, southern and western borders all form straight lines of exact longitude or latitude. However there’s an exception, a little notch at the far northwestern…

  • Killiniq Island, Canada

    Sometime I come across the most interesting topics while researching other topics, as was the case when I investigated the Labrador Boundary Dispute recently. That thread led me to the unusual significance of Killiniq Island in northeastern Canada. Killiniq Island is very small. It’s only about 13 X 29 kilomteres (8 X 18 miles). It…

  • Traveling Man

    It seems I’ve done a lot of traveling as I look back across the last several months. I travel fairly frequently anyway for work and for pleasure, but this has been a particularly busy period. Here’s a recap of places I’ve visited since the Spring, as told through previous Twelve Mile Circle dispatches. If you’ve…

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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…