The Stratford 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.
Stratford’s center stands about 1,110 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,070 ft to 1,180 ft, a difference of 110 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Chimney Hill, about 1,330 ft, 14 miles southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Oscar Group (shale, sandstone, limestone), 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.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. 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 Stratford reaches the Gulf of America by way of Spring Brook Creek, Canadian Sandy Creek, the Canadian, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,150 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Murray Lake and Ozark Lake.
600 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Stratford; river miles along the main stem, rounded.