The Elizabethtown 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.
Elizabethtown’s center stands about 400 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 310 ft to 600 ft, a difference of 290 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Williams Hill, about 1,100 ft, 13 miles northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows St. Louis Limestone, from the Middle Mississippian, 331 to 347 million years old.
The section below crosses 8 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 36×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Middle Mississippian, 331 to 347 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Limestone, sandstone, shale. Age: Late Mississippian, 324 to 331 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Limestone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Limestone, sandstone, shale. Age: Middle Mississippian, 331 to 347 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 2 smaller units 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 Elizabethtown reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,060 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Elizabethtown; river miles along the main stem, rounded.