Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • Bowling Greener

    I work from my home most days. So I have an IP Phone on my laptop that communicates with our Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) system back at our physical office. Anyway the telephone rang — well I’m not sure those are even the right words anymore. Let me start again. So the laptop opened…

  • Mutual Ownership Defense Housing

    My reference to Audubon Park, New Jersey in For More Birds revealed an historic experiment in middle class public housing. In that instance the earlier residents of Audubon voted the newly-arrived shipyard workers out of their borough. So in response, those displaced residents created a separate Audubon Park borough. In the meantime, that anecdote revealed…

  • For More Birds

    I kicked-up a lot of material as I researched Audubon, Iowa in the recent For the Birds. Originally I’d hope to feature several Audubon towns in the United States — and I do believe they are found only in the United States — and was completely overwhelmed by wonderful delights in rural Iowa. Today I…

  • For the Birds

    While researching family history recently I came across several distantly related individuals who were born and married in the town of Audubon, Iowa, a place that is also the seat of government for a county of the same name. I wondered, as I combed through archival records, whether they commemorated famed 19th Century naturalist, ornithologist,…

  • Named for Captain Newport

    It started with a 12MC article, Upstart Eclipses Namesake and more specifically with an amusing comment from from KCJeff, “I’m willing to go out on a limb and state from my perspective that Newfoundland has surpassed Foundland!” From there I determined to find equally clever examples along the same vein. I stopped at a list…

  • Just as Enigmatic

    Why? Because. Why Not? I dunno. It’s a puzzle. It’s a riddle. I unearthed an Enigma and I discovered a Paradox. Then I decided to have a little fun with a few more place names along a similar vein. Many of them defied explanation and remained enigmatic. They can still be enjoyed simply for their…

  • Georgia’s Enigma

    A couple of earlier topics conglomerated conceptually in my mind to create my recent fascination with the U.S. state of Georgia’s Enigma. I discovered Enigma — it’s an actual town in Georgia that has about 1,200 residents — as I researched Shaped Like it Sounds (Street Edition). Enigma contained an Ell Street, which indeed resembled…

  • From Camp to Town

    When I mentioned The Bloodshot Eye recently I hadn’t realized that I’d stumbled upon a “thing”. I’d encountered a long history of annual Camp Meetings held by the Methodist Church. Back then I featured the unusual circle-and-spokes streets of Pitman Grove, New Jersey (map). Of course that included the tiny Victorian-era cottages that lined them.…

  • Upstart Eclipses Namesake

    When I think of “New” places I tend to fuse together the full placenames mentally into a single phrase and begin to overlook the separate elements. I don’t forget completely that earlier entities inspired newer ones, although I mostly overlook the original namesake within the larger string. For example, if I considered Orléans in France…

  • When Planners Get Bored

    I’ve been collecting a bunch of oddly shaped and unusually themed neighborhoods and didn’t know what to do with them. They didn’t have any similarity amongst them, even appearing in completely different parts of the world, although I wondered if perhaps I could force them into a set anyway. The first notion that came to…

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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…