The Spurgeon 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.
9° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1897. Next is 10° in 1959.
Spurgeon’s center stands about 490 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 430 ft to 630 ft, a difference of 200 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Big Ditney Hill, about 680 ft, 10 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Carbondale Group (shale, sandstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 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.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale.
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 Spurgeon reaches the Gulf of America by way of Honey Creek, the South Fork Patoka, the Patoka, Big Bayou, the Wabash River Old Channel, the Old Channel Wabash, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,230 river miles.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Spurgeon; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Spurgeon has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 25° in January. A normal year brings about 11 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 48 inches of water.
On November 14 Spurgeon normally reaches 57° and falls to 37°. The record high is 77°, in 1971; the record low 11°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 2.40 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1897 from the Evansville Area threaded record (Evansville Regional Airport, 20 miles southwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.