Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Tag: Ohio

  • 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.…

  • 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…

  • Hardly Tropic

    Technically, the tropics would be an area hugging the equator between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, between approximately 23°26′-or-so north and south. The two latitudes marked the extent the sun might appear directly overhead if only briefly on a single day, the summer solstice. Tropics also had a more widespread definition…

  • Delphia

    The start for this research came from a recent tragic incident, a drowning at Triadelphia Reservoir in Maryland. My sympathies extend to the young victim’s family and friends of course. Afterwards I began to wonder how the reservoir got its unusual name. How did a triad (a group of three) apply to “Delphia.” The most…

  • Multichillicothe

    Chillicothe served as the initial capital of the State of Ohio, a fact Twelve Mile Circle noted recently. The name didn’t sound as if it derived from a European language. Indeed, it came from the language of the Shawnee, an Algonquian-speaking people. Chillicothe, the former Ohio capital, may have been the first town of that…

  • Ohio Capitals

    I enjoyed researching the migrating state capitals of Alabama and Georgia. So why not try another state? Yes, I think I will focus on Ohio. I discovered an interesting website in the process too, Ohio History Central “researched and written by staff at the Ohio Historical Society” It seemed to be a well-written site in…

  • Catbird Seat

    “In the catbird seat” is an idiomatic expression in the United States. But is that true anywhere else? I don’t know. Essentially it means “a position of great prominence or advantage” (Merriam-Webster). Regardless, this was a rather unusual expression. What exactly did it mean, I wondered for so many years. Even so I never considered…

  • 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.…

  • Portage USA

    The U.S. government shutdown ended last week and I forgot that I still had one piece of unfinished business remaining. The USGS Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) came back online so I was ready to go. I focused on Canadian portages previously, and I had a great time doing that by the way. Now I…