The Jamestown 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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79° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1936. Next is 76° in 1985.
Jamestown’s center stands about 970 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 680 ft to 1,030 ft, a difference of 350 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Short Mountain, about 1,650 ft, 15 miles south.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Salem, Warsaw, and Harrodsburg Limestones, undivided, from the Carboniferous, 324 to 359 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 31×. 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 12 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 8 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: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 0.7 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 Jamestown reaches the Gulf of America by way of Town Branch, the Cumberland, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,500 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Bards Lake, Lake Cumberland and Cordell Hull Reservoir.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Jamestown; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Jamestown has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 25° in January. About 57 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 5 inches of snow.
On November 14 Jamestown normally reaches 57° and falls to 33°. The record high is 76°, in 1993; the record low 14°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.23 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1936 at Jamestown Wwtp, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
