Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • Cornfield

    I wouldn’t quite call it a groundswell. However, more than one hundred different people searched for “cornfield” on Twelve Mile Circle over the last five years. So obviously readers want an article based on cornfields and I shall oblige. Never say that 12MC doesn’t respond to its loyal fans. I interpreted cornfield to mean Corn…

  • Five Years of Searching

    Twelve Mile Circle featured an article with the curious title Search for Search and Other Tales about two years ago. This effort examined a year’s worth of search queries that people entered into the website. To be clear as before, these weren’t random searches from Google or other sources, these were actual words or phrases…

  • Shortest Town + State Combo

    I wondered what town and state had the fewest letters in its collective name. For example, my hometown of Arlington, Virginia had 17 letters. That wasn’t very short. Why would anyone care? I don’t know. Maybe someone had a job where they had to write down their town and state repeatedly to the point where…

  • Nestling Newark

    It began as a simple enough proposition once I noticed Newark, Ohio on a map. Was it related somehow to the Newark in New Jersey, and what about the Newark in Delaware? Did they all intertwine in a way? It sounded like a mystery that I needed to solve. Newark, New Jersey I noticed Newark,…

  • Lake Neusiedl

    All that talk of endorheic basins in County Divided got me wondering about similar conditions in other unexpected places. It seemed farfetched to find an area lacking natural drainage to the sea on the Great Plains of North America. So did a similar condition in central Europe. I searched around and the largest place in…

  • On the Steps

    I clicked through television channels aimlessly the other day, a boredom-induced activity of mine. Then I came across a famous a scene from one of the Rocky movies. The hero Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) started running up the steps in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (map). You know the scene I’m talking about.…

  • Small Change, Big Difference

    It struck me that Cheyenne (the capital city of the U.S. state of Wyoming) and Cayenne (the capital city of the French overseas department of Guyane française) sounded remarkably similar in name. Yet, as locations go they couldn’t be more dissimilar even though only a couple of letters and a slight voice inflection separated them.…

  • Good Fortuna

    Fortuna was the Roman goddess of prosperity and luck. That would be an excellent name for any location hoping for some of that mojo rub off. I was aware of a Fortuna in California (map), probably the largest Fortuna in the United States. People there lived in the heart of redwood country. I’m sure it’s…

  • County Divided

    Look to the far northwestern corner of North Dakota, right up next to Canada and Montana. There sits a county with a curious name, Divide (map). It appeared somewhat rectangular like many other counties on the sparsely-populated Great Plains. Few natural features could take the place of arbitrary straight lines in this emptiness. I’d encountered…

  • Beaufort or Badminton

    Two towns sharing the exact same name sat not too far from each other in the Carolinas. Colonial settlers arrived on various points along that swath of coastline at around the same time. So this increased the odds of a relationship between identical names. Indeed, that was the case albeit with a twist. The Beauforts…

Latest Comments

  1. The British flag continues to fly at Roche Harbor, a couple miles north of English Camp.

  3. Been there Once for a few years. In 76 &77. Ran cooperative store. Even though it was very isolated It…

  4. As an Alaskan I always wondered why Interstates were a big deal. From my point of view a road went…