Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • American Angola

    I discovered distant relatives during my ongoing family research who lived in Angola, New York about a century ago. That seemed like an odd location for a town to carry such a name. I wondered if it could have been a coincidence. Maybe early settlers corrupted a Native American word used by the Iroquois who…

  • Circleville Survived

    The squared circle wasn’t the only fascinating story hiding in Circleville, Ohio (map). The town survived and grew in spite of its early experiment with urban renewal. I’d wondered how a town so named could have escaped my attention for the last several years. In the meantime I’d felt a weird sense of déjà vu…

  • Square the Circle

    Twelve Mile Circle is always on the lookout for circles for the completely obvious reason. Seeing Circleville, Ohio appearing on a map drew my attention even as I searched for something completely different. My mind raced as I abandoned my earlier effort. I shifted my attention to the pursuit of geographic hoops, bands and rings.…

  • Cumberland

    People have expressed a couple of distinct thoughts as I’ve discussed my upcoming bike trip along the Great Allegheny Passage. The immediate reaction was that I must be crazy and then I’d explain that I’m not intending to ride it all in a single day. The second was confusion about its endpoint in Cumberland. Multiple…

  • 2015 Travel Plans

    Twelve Mile Circle has some bold travel plans for 2015 if I do say so myself. I’ll keep it domestic this year unlike 2014 although I might cross the border into Canada briefly during one of the trips. As always, I welcome assistance as I begin my initial planning. Please feel free to offer comments…

  • Hairy Man

    I don’t know why I started wondering about Bigfoot this morning. Yes, the actual Bigfoot, as in Sasquatch the large mysterious cryptid hominid of North America’s Pacific Northwest region. I don’t put much faith in the whole Bigfoot phenomenon because I think one would have been discovered by now if it existed, making it all…

  • Bogus

    The word “bogus” had a murky history. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it may have dated back as far as 1827, used in Ohio as a slang term for a counterfeiter’s apparatus. Somehow it became the name of a machine used to manufacture fake coins. Then bogus became counterfeit or fake in a more…

  • Undignified Floods

    Floods are awful in any form and I don’t wish to diminish or make light of that one overriding consideration. However there are floods of a “normal” variety — if an event so awful can be referred to so cavalierly — and then there are the truly bizarre. Either way, it leaves behind lost lives,…

  • World’s Fair Towers

    I suppose this is something of a Part 3 addendum to the recent Southern Swing articles although maybe it’s not truly the case. Perhaps it would be better to call it “inspired” by those earlier articles. We broke the return trip into a two-day event with an overnight stay in Knoxville, Tennessee. The hotel happened…

  • Southern Swing, Part 2

    The second part of my quick southern trip moved west. We began in St. Augustine, Florida a couple of days earlier and now it was time to move on to family on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. This transformed into an exercise in county counting. My completion map of Florida counties changed dramatically for the better…

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…