The Phillips 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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71° on Nov. 16, 1927, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 70° in 1909.
Phillips’s center stands about 570 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 500 ft to 1,450 ft, a difference of 950 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Sugarloaf Mountain, about 4,210 ft, 14 miles north.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Devonian granodiorite (muscovite accessory mineral), from the Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old.
The section below crosses 8 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 5×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Granodiorite. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Quartzite, calc-silicate-rock. Age: Silurian to Devonian, 359 to 445 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Metasandstone, pelitic-schist, metasiltstone. Age: Early Devonian, 394 to 422 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Schist. Age: Early Devonian, 394 to 422 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Mudstone. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Silurian, 425 to 434 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 2 smaller units along the line are not listed.
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 Phillips reaches the Atlantic Ocean by way of Cottle Brook, the Sandy and the Kennebec: about 160 river miles.
95 miles of the trip are on the Kennebec.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Phillips; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Phillips has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 79° in July; winter nights fall to about 6° in January. A normal year brings about 94 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 50 inches of water.
On November 14 Phillips normally reaches 45° and falls to 26°. The record high is 66°, in 1930; the record low 3°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 2.35 in, fell in 1937.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Farmington, 12 miles southeast, 160 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
