The Bell Buckle 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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14° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1951. Next is 16° in 1969.
Bell Buckle’s center stands about 860 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 820 ft to 1,160 ft, a difference of 340 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Prater Hill, about 1,350 ft, 11 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Nashville Group; Bigby-Cannon Limestone and Hermitage Formation (limestone, calcarenite), from the Ordovician, 445 to 487 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 29×. 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. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Chert. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Limestone, calcarenite. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 3 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 Bell Buckle reaches the Gulf of America by way of Bell Buckle Creek, the Duck, the Tennessee, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,370 river miles.
Lake on the way: Pickwick Lake.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bell Buckle; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bell Buckle has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 29° in January. About 59 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 1 inch of snow.
On November 14 Bell Buckle normally reaches 62° and falls to 37°. The record high is 80°, in 1999; the record low 20°, in 1969. The most rain on this date, 0.96 in, fell in 2007.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1951 at Shelbyville Water Dept, 10 miles southwest, 100 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
