Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • A Local Journey Briefly Through Time

    Google released its back catalog of Street View images recently, allowing users to understand locational changes since the introduction of Street View in 2007. I figured I’d let the hype die-down a bit and check it out. Succinctly, I considered it an interesting novelty and probably not much more than that at the moment. So…

  • Schoolcraft Daze

    Now where were we before I took off for a couple of weeks on my Riverboat Adventure? I believe I was discussing Henry Rowe Schoolcraft and various places named in his honor scattered through the Upper-Midwest of the United States, principally Michigan and Minnesota. So I learned long ago that leaving things unsaid could be…

  • Riverboat Adventure, Part 6 (Signs)

    I thought I’d focus the final installment of the Riverboat Adventure on something a little more whimsical. Sometimes I have trouble remembering facts for a given place so I take photographs of informational signs. Usually this happens at historical sites. Sometimes signs provide greater explanation or context than what’s available on Internet pages. They serve…

  • Riverboat Adventure, Part 5 (Americana)

    One of the reasons I enjoyed the various marathon series offered by Mainly Marathons — other than the fact that I didn’t have to run them — was that they provided an opportunity to see parts of the country not normally experienced by casual tourists. I’ve done this twice now, first with the Dustbowl Series…

  • Riverboat Adventure, Part 4 (History)

    The rich history of the Lower Mississippi valley didn’t start with the Europeans. What they left behind however became an indelible legacy along the banks of a river that mirrored the growing pains of a nascent nation. These continued to reverberate into modern times. We attempted to immerse ourselves in various facets spanning multiple centuries.…

  • Riverboat Adventure, Part 3 (Borders)

    Europeans began to subdivide the Lower Mississippi watershed into various colonial claims, and the nascent United States carved it further into states, counties and even smaller units. They used the rivers as boundaries in some instances, and straight lines laid arbitrarily in others. Both interacted to form an awesome string of geo-oddities throughout the region.…

  • Riverboat Adventure, Part 2 (Original Inhabitants)

    Long before Europeans and their descendants tagged the Lower Mississippi River valley with a cornucopia of artificial lines, forming states, and counties, and meridians and so forth, the area already had a remarkable human history. Native Americans left behind laboriously-constructed earthen mounds. Those served a variety of residential, ceremonial and funereal purposes all along the…

  • Riverboat Adventure, Part 1 (The River)

    12MC is back! Thank you for bearing with me while I took a brief respite from posting new articles. There were logistical reasons. Each race in the five state series took much of the morning, then we’d have to drive to the next location (stopping at geo-oddity sites along the way), arrive late each afternoon,…

  • On Hiatus

    The Twelve Mile Circle will take a little break while I’m collecting new material during the Riverboat Excursion. The driving distances are too great and the number of sites visited too numerous to do them justice in a bunch of rushed articles written from the road. Be assured, I’m gathering great stuff and the wait…

  • The Pitch

    A long-term member of the 12MC community and I were discussing dream jobs lately, ones that combined our slightly obsessive-compulsive list-making tendencies with our respective divergent interests. Mine focused on geographic and historic oddities of multiple flavors tied together with a healthy string of County Counting progressions. The trick, as we thought about it, was…

Latest Comments

  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…