Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • 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…

  • Southern Swing, Part 1

    I still hate airlines. I don’t fear flying, I simply want to withhold my money from those greedy [censored] until the tight squeeze of market forces compel them to start treating their passengers with a little respect. I’m pretty much at the point where I’ll drive to any destination of a thousand miles or even…

  • High Level

    It began with High Level, in Alberta, Canada. I came across the name and wondered what made it so special. It didn’t seem to be all that high level. In fact it appeared to be downright flat at an elevation of 325 metres (1,066 feet) atop the Canadian Prairies. Well, being that far north I…

  • Old Greer County

    I talked about the longest postal route in the United States recently. That saga recounted Jim Ed Bull and his 187.6 mi (302 km) daily slog from Mangum, Oklahoma through the rural countryside. I also discovered an interesting bit of trivia during my research. This little corner of southwestern Oklahoma used to be part of…

  • That Other Warsaw

    In the recent Not the City article I focused on Richmond, not the city of course, but the county. There, the local government centered on a village called Warsaw (map). That seemed like an exceptionally odd choice. There wasn’t a large Polish diaspora on Virginia’s Northern Neck as best as I could tell. Why name…

  • Not the City

    I examined a stack of family files online and I learned that a distant relative lived in Houston, Texas. I’ve traced numerous family members back through there so it didn’t surprise me. However the records didn’t make sense as I read through them. Geographic identifiers seemed unfamiliar and out of place. Then I slowly realized…

  • Fighting Words

    If someone named a town “Battle” then I would expect that it might commemorate a great conflict taking place nearby. I believed most logical people would find that a reasonable conclusion. So I examined several occurrences and discovered that it wasn’t necessarily the case. Usually the battles referenced were rather inconsequential or not even battles…

  • Going Postal, Part 2

    As I mentioned in Part 1, the first installment dealt with physical post offices and this one will focus on methods of postal delivery. Both featured examples drawn primarily from the United States Postal Service’s “fun facts” page. Mule Pack animals would seem to be an antiquated method of mail delivery. Certainly horses, mules or…

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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…