The Sharpsburg 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.
82° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1892. Next is 80° in 1958.
Sharpsburg’s center stands about 1,020 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 830 ft to 1,010 ft, a difference of 180 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Ashlock Formation, Grant Lake and Calloway Creek Limestones, and Fairview Formation, undivided, from the Ordovician, 445 to 487 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 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.
Limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 10 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 Sharpsburg reaches the Gulf of America by way of Town Branch, Hinkston Creek, the South Fork Licking, the Licking, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,650 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 Sharpsburg; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Sharpsburg has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. A normal year brings about 9 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 48 inches of water.
On November 14 Sharpsburg normally reaches 56° and falls to 32°. The record high is 76°, in 1927; the record low 8°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.17 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1892 at Mount Sterling, 10 miles south. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.