The Princeton 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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6° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1909. Next is 8° in 1986.
Princeton’s center stands about 2,440 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,270 ft to 2,820 ft, a difference of 550 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Buckhorn Knob, about 4,060 ft, 8 miles southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Bluestone and Princeton Formations (sandstone, shale), from the Carboniferous, 324 to 359 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 10×. 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, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, limestone, shale. Age: Silurian to Devonian, 359 to 445 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Age: Ordovician to Silurian, 422 to 487 million years old. About 0.9 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 Princeton reaches the Gulf of America by way of Brush Creek, the Bluestone, the New River, the Kanawha, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,880 river miles.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Princeton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Princeton has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 79° in July; winter nights fall to about 24° in January. A normal year brings about 35 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 41 inches of water.
On November 14 Princeton normally reaches 53° and falls to 35°. The record high is 81°, in 1993; the record low 8°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.97 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1909 from the Bluefield Area threaded record (Bluefield Mercer County Airport, 8 miles southwest, 420 ft higher). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
