The Bardstown 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.
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Bardstown’s center stands about 650 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 470 ft to 770 ft, a difference of 300 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Rohan Knob, about 1,070 ft, 9 miles south.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Laurel Dolomite, Osgood Formation, and Brassfield Dolomite, undivided (dolostone), from the Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 49×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Dolostone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 0.2 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 Bardstown reaches the Gulf of America by way of Town Creek, the Beech Fork, the Rolling Fork, the Salt River, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,370 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 Bardstown; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
