The Chester 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.
Chester’s center stands about 270 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 190 ft to 360 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Fleming Formation (clay, sandstone), from the Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 54×. 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: Pliocene, 2.6 to 5.3 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Clay, sandstone. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone-mudstone. Age: Late Eocene, 34 to 38 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Clay, sand. Age: Late Eocene to Early Oligocene, 28 to 38 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Mudstone, sand. Age: Oligocene, 23 to 34 million years old. About 0.5 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 Chester reaches the Gulf of America by way of Russell Creek and the Neches: about 200 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Sabine Lake and B A Steinhagen Lake.
110 miles of the trip are on the Neches.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Chester; river miles along the main stem, rounded.