Tag: Prison
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Fort Jefferson
Dry Tortugas National Park, Florida (April 2009) Identifying the Need A massive masonry fortress rose on Garden Key, one of the Dry Tortugas, seventy miles away from Key West in the Gulf of Mexico (map). It served as a link in the chain of coastal fortification built by the United States Army Corps of Engineers…
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Fort Delaware
Pea Patch Island, New Castle Co., Delaware (July 2000) The newly-minted United States government identified the need for a fort along the Delaware River. This would help protect the approaches to major port cities such as Wilmington, Delaware and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The military eyed Pea Patch Island, a swampy swath of river deposit that barely…
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Cross-Country, Part 8 (Bonus!)
Finally the end. Or was it? We’d driven most of the way across the United States. Then we spent a full week in Phoenix, Arizona. However, we weren’t completely done. Our rental home agreement ended two days before our return flight so we needed to spend a little time somewhere else. Originally my wife figured we could go down to…
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Ladylike Places
The recent Manly Places dealt with U.S. locations that swung wildly towards an overabundance of men. Naturally I also wanted to examine the opposite condition. The inverse of manly seemed as if it should be something like ladylike so that’s what I called the followup article. However, this one required more effort. Women lived longer…
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Manly Places
Where does the highest ratio of men live? An unknown visitor to Twelve Mile Circle posed that question in a recent search query. I didn’t learn why they wanted to know because I didn’t have a means to contact the person to ask. Nonetheless it seemed like an interesting query and I’d never considered it…
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Mundane First Name Places
Twelve Mile Circle received a visit from someone in Susanville, California (map) last week, landing right on the front page of the site. What an odd name for a town, I figured. It had to have a story. Who was Susan and why did she have a town named for her? Couldn’t the town founders…
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American Angola
I discovered distant relatives during my ongoing family research who lived in Angola, New York about a century ago. That seemed like an odd location for a town to carry such a name. I wondered if it could have been a coincidence. Maybe early settlers corrupted a Native American word used by the Iroquois who…
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A Prisoner to Geo-Oddities
I noticed a reference to a prison in Alaska that turned out to be located not too distant from where I roamed around the Kenai Peninsula during my journeys a few summers ago. It was a prison with a view, in fact it was located somewhere (map) in the background of this photo I took…