The Frenchburg 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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82° on Nov. 17, 1958, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1904. Next is 82° in 2020.
Frenchburg’s center stands about 900 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 810 ft to 1,350 ft, a difference of 540 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Westbrook Mountain, about 1,470 ft, 14 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Wildie, Nada, Halls Gap, Holtsclaw Siltstone, Cowbell, Nancy, Kenwood Siltstone, New Providence Shale, Sunbury Shale, Berea Sandstone, and Bedford Shale, undivided; Borden Formation locally includes Renfro Member in eastern Kentucky, from the Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 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 27×. 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. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 0.4 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 Frenchburg reaches the Gulf of America by way of Beaver Creek, the Licking, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,680 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 Frenchburg; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Frenchburg has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 25° in January. A normal year brings about 12 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 51 inches of water.
On November 14 Frenchburg normally reaches 57° and falls to 35°. The record high is 81°, in 1909; the record low 10°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.44 in, fell in 1951.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1904 at Cave Run Lake, 13 miles north-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
