The Columbia Furnace 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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Mostly cloudy; warmer
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80° on Nov. 16, 1955, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1889. Next is 79° in 1993.
Columbia Furnace’s center stands about 960 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 880 ft to 1,860 ft, a difference of 980 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mill Mountain, about 3,300 ft, 7 miles north.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Beekmantown Group (dolostone, limestone), from the Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old.
The section below crosses 16 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 8×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Silurian to Devonian, 359 to 445 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Cambrian to Ordovician, 445 to 542 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million 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. 10 smaller units along the line are not listed.
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 Columbia Furnace reaches Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Stony Creek, the North Fork Shenandoah, the Shenandoah and the Potomac: about 290 river miles.
180 miles of the trip are on the Potomac.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Columbia Furnace; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Columbia Furnace has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 21° in January. A normal year brings about 24 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 40 inches of water.
On November 14 Columbia Furnace normally reaches 57° and falls to 32°. The record high is 79°, in 1955; the record low 6°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.30 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1889 at Woodstock 2 NE, 8 miles east-northeast, 300 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
