The Fort Valley plate. Relief from Copernicus GLO-30; rivers and lakes from USGS NHD; watersheds from the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset; roads and city limits from Census TIGER 2024.
86° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1892. Next is 85° in 1958.
Fort Valley’s center stands about 520 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 400 ft to 550 ft, a difference of 150 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Eocene undifferentiated (sand, clay), from the Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand, clay. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Clay, sand. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Clay, sand. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 0.7 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 1 smaller unit along the line are not listed.
Heights from Copernicus GLO-90 (a surface model: it includes buildings and tree canopy); summits from USGS GNIS; rivers from USGS NHDPlus HR; rock from the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation.
A raindrop that lands in Fort Valley reaches the Atlantic Ocean by way of Big Indian Creek, the Ocmulgee and the Altamaha: about 290 river miles.
140 miles of the trip are on the Ocmulgee.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Fort Valley; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Fort Valley has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 94° in July; winter nights fall to about 36° in January. About 47 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Fort Valley normally reaches 70° and falls to 42°. The record high is 83°, in 1955; the record low 21°, in 2013. The most rain on this date, 1.40 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1892 from the Macon Area threaded record (Macon Middle Ga Regional Airport, 16 miles northeast, 180 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.