The Spotsylvania Courthouse 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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Partly cloudy; warmer
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79° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1995. Next is 79° in 2024.
Spotsylvania Courthouse’s center stands about 320 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 210 ft to 390 ft, a difference of 180 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Hamiltons Thicket, about 480 ft, 9 miles northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Porphyroblastic Garnet-Biotite Gneiss (biotite-gneiss), from the Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old.
The section below crosses 13 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 47×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Slate, schist. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Amphibolite. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Biotite-gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 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. 7 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 Spotsylvania Courthouse reaches Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Po River, the Poni, the Mattaponi and the York: about 150 river miles.
100 miles of the trip are on the Mattaponi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Spotsylvania Courthouse; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Spotsylvania Courthouse has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 25° in January. A normal year brings about 11 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 43 inches of water.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1995 at Fredericksburg Sewage, 10 miles northeast, 260 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
