The Quitman 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.
Partly cloudy
Showers likely; cooler
Chance of showers; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
87° on Nov. 14, 2005, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1989. Next is 84° in 1989.
Quitman’s center stands about 410 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 330 ft to 480 ft, a difference of 150 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Stivers Hill, about 650 ft, 15 miles east-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Queen City Sand (siltstone, sandstone), from the Middle Eocene, 38 to 48 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 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.
Siltstone, sandstone. Age: Middle Eocene, 38 to 48 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.
Sandstone. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Mudstone. Age: Late Paleocene to Early Eocene, 48 to 59 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 0.9 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 Quitman reaches the Gulf of America by way of Lake Fork Creek and the Sabine: about 430 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Toledo Bend Reservoir and Sabine Lake.
180 miles of the trip are on the Sabine.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Quitman; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Quitman has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 35° in January. About 45 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Quitman normally reaches 66° and falls to 46°. The record high is 87°, in 2005; the record low 29°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 0.65 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1989 at Lake Fork Reservoir, 5 miles west-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
