The Elizabethtown 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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10° on Nov. 17, 1959, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1871. Next is 10° in 2019.
Elizabethtown’s center stands about 500 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 450 ft to 900 ft, a difference of 450 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Gobblers Knob Hill, about 1,040 ft, 15 miles north-northwest.
The section below crosses 10 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 33×. 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, shale. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Middle Ordovician to Late Ordovician, 445 to 471 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million 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. 4 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 Elizabethtown reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Great Miami, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,460 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 Elizabethtown; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Elizabethtown has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. A normal year brings about 23 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 45 inches of water.
On November 14 Elizabethtown normally reaches 54° and falls to 35°. The record high is 76°, in 1931; the record low 12°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.71 in, fell in 1871.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1871 from the Cincinnati Area threaded record (Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, 11 miles southeast, 360 ft higher). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
