The Franklin 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.
76° on Nov. 16, 1993, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 74° in 1927.
Franklin’s center stands about 610 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 440 ft to 1,300 ft, a difference of 860 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Kittatinny Mountain, about 1,780 ft, 14 miles north-northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Franklin Marble, from the Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old.
The section below crosses 11 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 19×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Marble. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Cambrian to Early Ordovician, 471 to 497 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Biotite-gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1.1 to 1.1 billion 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. 5 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 Franklin reaches New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Hudson: about 180 river miles.
90 miles of the trip are on the Hudson.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Franklin; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Franklin has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. About 52 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Franklin normally reaches 52° and falls to 32°. The record high is 71°, in 1902; the record low 10°, in 1905. The most rain on this date, 1.37 in, fell in 1935.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Charlotteburg Reservoir, 10 miles southeast, 170 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.