The Marshall 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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78° on Nov. 11, 2006, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1995. Next is 75° in 1999.
Marshall’s center stands about 680 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 470 ft to 830 ft, a difference of 360 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is High Knob, about 2,380 ft, 14 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Marshall Metagranite, from the Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old.
The section below crosses 20 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 11×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Metabasalt. Age: Neoproterozoic to Cambrian, 487 to 1,000 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Biotite-gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Metagranite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Alkali-feldspar-syenite. Age: Neoproterozoic, 542 to 1,000 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Quartzite, conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Neoproterozoic, 542 to 1,000 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 14 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 Marshall reaches Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Piney Branch, Broad Run, the Occoquan and the Potomac: about 150 river miles.
85 miles of the trip are on the Potomac.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Marshall; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Marshall has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 24° in January. A normal year brings about 21 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 43 inches of water.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1995 at Front Royal, 18 miles west, 250 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
