The Thaxton 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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Mostly sunny; warmer
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14° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1953. Next is 18° in 1997.
Thaxton’s center stands about 410 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 340 ft to 530 ft, a difference of 190 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Liberty Hill, about 570 ft, 8 miles northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Porters Creek formation (clay), from the Paleocene, 56 to 66 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 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.
Sand, clay. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Clay. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Chalk, clay. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Claystone, clay. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 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.
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 Thaxton reaches the Gulf of America by way of Buttermilk Branch, Cane Creek, Mud Creek, the Little Tallahatchie, the Tallahatchie, the Yazoo and the Mississippi: about 820 river miles.
450 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Thaxton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Thaxton has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 31° in January. About 61 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Thaxton normally reaches 63° and falls to 42°. The record high is 84°, in 1955; the record low 14°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 2.31 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1953 at Pontotoc Experiment Sta, 15 miles southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
