The Baxter 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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7° on Nov. 16, 1933, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1892. Next is 9° in 1908.
Baxter’s center stands about 1,030 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 860 ft to 1,460 ft, a difference of 600 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bald Knob, about 2,180 ft, 13 miles east.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Monongahela Group (sandstone, siltstone, shale), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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 18×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous to Permian, 252 to 324 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 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.
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 Baxter reaches the Gulf of America by way of Paw Paw Creek, the Monongahela, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 2,070 river miles.
970 miles of the trip are on the Ohio.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Baxter; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Baxter has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 24° in January. About 48 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Baxter normally reaches 54° and falls to 36°. The record high is 77°, in 1971; the record low 11°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.62 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1892 at Fairmont, 6 miles south, 270 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
