The Fayette 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.
Fayette’s center stands about 720 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 620 ft to 830 ft, a difference of 210 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Cherokee Group - Cabaniss Subgroup, Krebs Subgroup (shale, sandstone, siltstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. 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, sandstone, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 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 Fayette reaches the Gulf of America by way of Bonne Femme Creek, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,370 river miles.
1,170 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Fayette; river miles along the main stem, rounded.