The Fordsville 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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13° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1972. Next is 14° in 1986.
Fordsville’s center stands about 500 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 420 ft to 730 ft, a difference of 310 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Knob Lick Hill, about 870 ft, 13 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Caseyville Formation (sandstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 45×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale. 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 2 mi of the line.
Limestone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 0.6 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 Fordsville reaches the Gulf of America by way of the West Fork Adams Fork, the Adams Fork, the Rough, the Green River, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,300 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 Fordsville; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Fordsville has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 27° in January. A normal year brings about 11 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 49 inches of water.
On November 14 Fordsville normally reaches 57° and falls to 38°. The record high is 73°, in 1973; the record low 13°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 2.21 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1972 at Cannelton, 18 miles north. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
