The Framingham quadrangle covers about 55 square miles and is centered approximately 18 miles west of Boston. Even though the major topographic features are controlled by the lithology and structure of the bedrock, glacial features, such as drumlins, kames and kettles, kame terraces, eskers, gently sloping deltas, and flat-lying lake-bottom deposits, have modified the preglacial topography. Some bedrock plucking occurred, especially on the south or southeast sides of some hills, and some valleys probably were deepened. A thin veneer of till overlies much of the bedrock and is most extensive in the hills in the western half of the map area. These deposits, which are mostly gently sloping kame deltas or flat-lying lake-bottom deposits, were laid down in or graded to glacial Lakes Charles (Clapp, 1904, p. 198) and Sudbury (Goldthwait, 1905, p. 274), which formed during deglaciation when melt waters were temporarily impounded. Some glacial-lake deposits were laid down in three smaller higher level lakes in the western part of the quadrangle.
With the exception of a small part of the southeast corner, which is drained by the Charles River, the quadrangle is drained by the Sudbury River, whose waters eventually flow into the Merrimack River in the northeast part of the state.
