Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • Named Like a Whole Other Country

    What if I said that I could drive from Atlanta to Detroit, or Cleveland to Santa Fe, or Miami to Memphis in an hour and a half? So how about driving from Jacksonville to Buffalo in an hour? No, I didn’t say fly, I said drive. My apologies in advance to the international audience that…

  • DeKalb

    DeKalb felt like such an odd choice for a relatively common place name in the United States. I’d seen it a number of times in various widely-distributed locations over the years. I’d pondered its pronunciation which generally seemed to sound like dee-KAB with a silent L. So, naturally I wondered about its origin. It didn’t…

  • Giant Artichoke

    I spent a few summers in Monterey, California when I was a kid. We’d land at the airport in San Francisco and drive south, cutting across the mouth of the agriculturally-oriented Salinas Valley before heading down towards the Monterey Peninsula. Oftentimes we’d stop in Castroville along the way for a special treat. The Route Through…

  • City of Frogs

    I love statistical clustering. Another moment of weirdness revealed itself on my never-ending family history quest. I’ve oftentimes searched for months without finding anything beyond mundane anecdotes of routine life. However, the latest one was far better. It actually tied to geography in a concrete way so bear with me as I provide context, or…

  • Keep it Moving

    Twelve Mile Circle examined freeways and motorways with the most lanes previously. That was a measurement of potential capacity. Would those massively-wide behemoths continue to reign supreme once someone posted actual traffic volumes? That wasn’t the case except for one notable exception. Comparisons weren’t easy although Annual Average Daily Traffic (AADT) seemed to be a…

  • Separate but Tallest

    Sometime examining something from a different angle provides interesting results. Other times it provides only the previous results, just with a different angle. Today it was the latter albeit with one unrelated twist at the end. I thought about a 12MC article from 2010, New Highpoint for the Netherlands. It pointed out the interesting situation…

  • Finding the Original Purpose

    I’m always on the lookout for unusual trivia. For example, something stuck in my mind a couple of years ago when I learned about the Augusta Canal. Logically it’s located in Augusta, Georgia, but that’s not what mattered. There was another claim that took a variety of forms. So I put that one on the…

  • Longest Routes for Smaller Areas

    The Twelve Mile Circle audience loves little puzzles. Knowing that, I thought I might try to fold a couple of related ideas that have fascinated lately into a single entry. First Dimension I looked back to one of the more popular 12MC concepts, the Longest Google Maps Routes. I published that about eighteen months ago…

  • The Resurrectionists

    There’s a reason why Twelve Mile Circle appears on the howderfamily.com domain. It began as a genealogy and family history site. 12MC started as a minor side project, an afterthought. I never abandoned the original purpose tough, even when my geo-oddities coverage grew exponentially more popular. A couple of weeks ago I stumbled upon a…

  • British Roads Oddities

    I spent quite a long time, probably a solid couple of hours going through the British Roads FAQ on Roads.org.uk. I found map locations for those that fascinated me the most. It presented an extensive FAQ and I’ve shared a small sample of questions and explanations below. Links and all due credit should go 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…