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.
Sunny
Mostly sunny; warmer
Sunny
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
81° on Nov. 15, 1958, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1891. Next is 80° in 1931.
Franklin’s center stands about 650 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 620 ft to 970 ft, a difference of 350 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Sumner Knob, about 1,270 ft, 14 miles east-southeast.
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 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 31×. 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, calcarenite. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 0.8 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 Franklin reaches the Gulf of America by way of North Ewingville Creek, the Harpeth, the Cumberland, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,270 river miles.
Lake on the way: Bards 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 Franklin; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Franklin has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 28° in January. About 54 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 2 inches of snow.
On November 14 Franklin normally reaches 62° and falls to 37°. The record high is 79°, in 1964; the record low 14°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 3.26 in, fell in 1915.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1891 at Franklin Sewage Plant, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
