The Pounding Mill 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
Mostly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy; warmer
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
11° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1989. Next is 12° in 2014.
Pounding Mill’s center stands about 2,200 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,000 ft to 3,460 ft, a difference of 1,460 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Beartown Mountain, about 4,710 ft, 15 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Knox Group (dolostone, limestone), from the Cambrian to Ordovician, 445 to 542 million years old.
The section below crosses 15 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 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Cambrian to Ordovician, 445 to 542 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Age: Ordovician to Silurian, 422 to 487 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 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. 9 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 Pounding Mill reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Clinch, the Tennessee, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,890 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Guntersville Lake, White Lake (historical), Pickwick Lake and Cummings 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 Pounding Mill; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Pounding Mill has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. A normal year brings about 18 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 45 inches of water.
On November 14 Pounding Mill normally reaches 58° and falls to 31°. The record high is 77°, in 1994; the record low 14°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.21 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1989 at Richlands, 5 miles west-northwest, 290 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
