Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • Mr. Walker’s Island Adventure

    It didn’t take much to get me started on another obsessive-compulsive exercise. Longtime reader Rhodent commented on my observations about a stalker on St. Martin’s Island (map) in Bangladesh. That made me even more curious about the underlying situation. So I needed to check every single image in painstaking detail to see if I could…

  • Switching Sides

    First, a disclaimer. Twelve Mile Circle deals with geo-oddities, not politics. It doesn’t take sides. However, the timing of this post fell closest to the Presidential Inauguration and I thought it might be acceptable to poke a toe just up to the line in a nonpartisan fashion. Reader “Joe” sent me an idea, as he…

  • Southernmost Bangladesh

    Twelve Mile Circle explored the Ends of the Earth recently, including the southernmost tip of Bangladesh. However, more accurately, the article reached the end of mainland Bangladesh. In the course of my research I found a spot even farther removed in the Chittagong Division, a place called Saint Martin’s Island (map). I never knew it…

  • Tenaha, Timpson, Bobo, and Blair

    During deep winter I focus a lot of efforts on my genealogy hobby. I think it’s because the holidays offer big blocks of time where I’m stuck indoors. I can concentrate on intricate details as I piece together my family puzzle. Recently a line of research brought my attention to a small town in East…

  • That Recurring State Line

    A random Twelve Mile Circle reader became an unwitting inspiration for this article simply because of where he or she lived. The little dot within Idaho on my Google Analytics dashboard mentioned State Line. That seemed too good to be true. I’ve done plenty of articles about border towns although I’d never noticed that one…

  • Adjacent Tree Towns

    While looking at a map recently I noticed two curious towns in Wisconsin. Their names seemed perfectly fine and normal, Poplar and Maple. Their proximity seemed more than a little coincidental. I never found an explanation for collocated tree towns and the pattern didn’t extend to other settlements in Douglas County. Nonetheless, I felt a…

  • That’s a Wrap

    Finally, 2016 ended. That’s a wrap. Then I went down a little tangent wondering about that particular expression. Fortunately there were sources such as the late William Safire who explored That’s/It’s a Wrap in 2005. It did refer to the movie industry as I believed although of more recent vintage than I imagined, perhaps dating…

  • Ladysmith

    A few weeks ago I wrote about Triangle, a name on a road sign that I pondered as I sat stuck in traffic on a drive back from Richmond, Virginia. I also noticed another exit on that fateful trip as I slogged through miles of gridlock. The sign said Ladysmith and my mind began to…

  • Merry Christmas

    A Merry Christmas to everyone reading Twelve Mile Circle who celebrates the day. A Happy Holiday or well wishes to everyone else as well. Every once in awhile the 12MC publishing schedule falls directly on Christmas. So a Christmas theme felt appropriate even with a diminished audience. Ironically, most people with enough time to read…

  • Crystal City

    Familiar place names always catch my attention. Often they share a bond with locations near my home in the Washington, DC area. Several years ago I wrote about one such situation in A Tale of Three Ridges. This time Crystal City served as the common denominator. Crystal City, Virginia Virginia’s Crystal City abuts Ronald Reagan…

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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…