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I enjoy county counting but it becomes increasingly difficult to reach new counties as my count increases. That’s why I began a sub-variant involving overnight counties. You see it counts “more” by my arbitrary rules if I spend an entire night there instead of simply passing through. That’s because it involves a tangible financial commitment, […] The post Culpeper Co., Virginia appeared first on Twelve Mile Circle - An Appreciation of Unusual Places.
If you’re driving along Indiana’s portion of Interstate 69, say from Evansville to Bloomington, you are going to cross a Time Zone boundary. It happens between Mile Markers 37.5 and 39.0, about forty minutes north of Evansville at normal highway speeds. But please note that the situation gets genuinely weird as you cross between zones […] The post Indiana I-69 Time Zone Crossing appeared first on Twelve Mile Circle - An Appreciation of Unusual Places.
It seemed strange to fixate on a single tree for more than a decade but that’s exactly what happened. I notice it a few weeks every autumn and then quickly forget about it for another year. That all started sometime around 2013 when I began to ride a stretch of the Capital Crescent Trail along […] The post Osage Orange appeared first on Twelve Mile Circle - An Appreciation of Unusual Places.
I hinted at ulterior motives in the last article about my long weekend in Denver. I didn’t travel all the way out there just to casually tour around. Indeed, I had a very specific purpose in mind — checking off a bucket list item in fact — attending the Great American Beer Festival. The Biggest […] The post Great American Beer Festival (and More) appeared first on Twelve Mile Circle - An Appreciation of Unusual Places.
I’ve been traveling a lot lately. It feels like I just got back from the Pacific Northwest, and before that England, and then I’m heading right back out the door again. This should do it for awhile though; I need some rest. But this trip was a little different because I was there for some […] The post Broomfield and Denver Weekend appeared first on Twelve Mile Circle - An Appreciation of Unusual Places.
More in cartography
This bird-eye diagram of lower Manhattan appeared in a Harpers Magazine article from 1908 titled “The Story of a Street.” In 1844 the Dutch governor of New Amsterdam ordered the town’s citizens to construct a cattle guard at the north end of the settlement to keep the cattle in and the Indians out. Lower Manhattan, beforeland fillingwas much narrower than it is today. The cattle guard may have stretched all the way from the East River to the North (now Hudson) River but at a minimum extended from Pearl St to Broadway, covering most of this distance. The original guard was likely made of trees that had been cut down and piled up. There were approximately two hundred houses within this enclosed area. After some peaceful years, the administration began to feel more of a threat from the Indians and the British. A wooden fence was ordered built about 40-50 feet south of the cattle guard, along the southern line of what would become Wall Street. There were two gates in the wall to allow for commerce, one at Broadway and another at Pearl St. A couple of years later, seeing how much of the wall had been chopped down by residents for firewood, the barricades were rebuilt. This did not stop the British, who came by sea and were welcomed by many residents after suffering much misrule from the Dutch. As the city grew and wall maintenance costs mounted, pressures mounted to take the wall down. Real estate speculators built lots to the north and finally, in 1699 New York ceased to be a walled city. Some interesting items from the map include the Bowerie (Bowery), an antiquated Dutch word for farm that was north of the cattle guard and the Heere Graft canal, now Broad Street. The cattle guard was interrupted by this canal. Unrelated side note: I hate self promotion so I regret to inform you that Map of the Week is now the Number One Cartography Blog according to Feedspot. They even gave me a badge. You can see it on the sidebar but also here it is below. Their rankings are determined by “relevancy, authority, social media followers & freshness“ so I guess I’m feeling pretty fresh! I know many of the other people on their list and I am quite honored to be among them, let alone ranked above them. Thanks to all you readers for helping make me relevant and fresh!
I am pleased to report that GeoCurrents has been selected by FeedSpot as one of the “100 Best GIS Blogs” for 2025. It is an honor to receive this recognition and I give my sincere thanks to FeedSpot for the acknowledgement, although I do have to say that GeoCurrents is more a “GIS-adjacent blog” than […] The post GeoCurrents Listed as One of the 100 Best GIS Blogs and Websites in 2025 appeared first on GeoCurrents.
As the previous GeoCurrents post argued, the division of the terrestrial world into a handful of continents derives in part from the division of the Earth’s crust into tectonic plates. But there is another geological factor equally pertinent to the concept of “continent.” It refers not to individual landmasses but rather to a particular kind […] The post Mapping Continents Based on Continental Crust appeared first on GeoCurrents.
