Tag: Wisconsin
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Where the Stadium Once Stood
I guess the recent Ghost Signs got me thinking about the way things used to be in an earlier age. My memory circled back to a time when professional baseball didn’t exist in Washington, DC and we used to travel to Baltimore to see the Orioles play. This happened a lot when I was a…
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Adjacent Tree Towns
While looking at a map recently I noticed two curious towns in Wisconsin. Their names seemed perfectly fine and normal, Poplar and Maple. Their proximity seemed more than a little coincidental. I never found an explanation for collocated tree towns and the pattern didn’t extend to other settlements in Douglas County. Nonetheless, I felt a…
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Ladysmith
A few weeks ago I wrote about Triangle, a name on a road sign that I pondered as I sat stuck in traffic on a drive back from Richmond, Virginia. I also noticed another exit on that fateful trip as I slogged through miles of gridlock. The sign said Ladysmith and my mind began to…
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Moorish Revival
Occasionally Twelve Mile Circle likes to feature lesser known architectural styles. For example Rock Cut, Pueblo Deco, Egyptian Rivival and Octagons all appeared in these pages. I came across another one I found both fascinating and rare that I wanted to share. I’d never heard of Moorish Revival before. This design became modestly popular during…
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What the Dell?
My annual long relaxing August weekend in Wisconsin came to an end. I can’t think of any place I’d rather pass the time for a few days than Wisconsin — in the summer. Many people who come to this part of the country end up in Wisconsin Dells. I never thought much about the definition…
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Weird Place Names Kept Coming
I found myself in familiar territory once again, with an overflowing backlog of article ideas. That signaled time for another round of house cleaning. In the past I’d featured weird place names that I’d encountered while I searched for other topics. Then I focused on More Weird Place Names and finally Even More Weird Place…
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Thanks a Million
Longtime readers know that I check user statistics for Twelve Mile Circle daily. However, I don’t often examine figures that go all the way back to the earliest days of the blog. I did that recently, and to my surprise discovered that visitors had arrived from more than one million distinct sources since its inception.…
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Mike
Twelve Mile Circle highlighted Mundane First Name Places in the previous article. However, I left out the most prolific mundane name I’d discovered to date. That one, I really wanted to feature it in its own stand-alone spotlight. It didn’t make sense to combine it with all of the others because of its sheer popularity…
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Highway to Park
A park near my home sits above an interstate highway leading into Washington, DC. Here, builders tucked the roadway into a little valley leading downhill towards the Potomac River and put a concrete lid above it. Drivers on Interstate 66 enter a tunnel briefly before returning to daylight and crossing the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge into…