Mart is eighteen miles east of Waco on State Highway 164, in the eastern corner of McLennan County. It is a town of long-established lots on deep Blackland clay, and the yards show it.
Tell us what your yard is doing and we’ll come take a look — no charge.
Mart is eighteen miles east of Waco on State Highway 164, in the eastern corner of McLennan County. It is a town of long-established lots on deep Blackland clay, and the yards show it.
Mart was Willow Springs in the 1870s and took its present name in 1880, when residents expected it to become a commercial center. For a while it did: the International and Great Northern connected it to Waco and Marlin just after 1900, the town incorporated in 1901, and by 1914 it had an ice factory, three gins, a cotton oil mill and about 3,000 people. The Handbook notes the paved streets, sidewalks and utilities went in during that boom. Population peaked around 3,800 in 1929 and has drifted lower since.
The practical upshot for a homeowner is that Mart's lots and street grades were set a century ago and have not been touched much since. Water in a Mart yard is following a path someone laid out for a very different town.
Cotton and wheat were the cash crops here from the 1880s on, and the soil under Mart is the reason: Houston Black clay, which the NRCS describes as nearly all cultivated for cotton, sorghum and corn. It holds water and nutrients beautifully for a crop. For a lawn, it means permeability rated very slow and runoff rated high even when the ground is almost flat. Rain either runs off or stands. It does not soak in.
There is a second effect that farmers here have always known: after a dry summer the clay opens cracks half an inch to four inches wide. The first big rain vanishes into them. Then the clay swells shut, and every storm after that ponds on the surface until it evaporates.
On an older Mart house we work through a short list. Where do the downspouts discharge - at the corner of the slab, or somewhere useful? Does the ground fall away from the house in the first ten feet, or has a flowerbed border, a walkway or a hundred years of settling reversed it? That is a grading question. And is there a chronic low spot that cannot be graded out because of a fence, a driveway or the neighbor's lot? That is where a French drain earns its keep, collecting water the clay will not absorb and moving it to the street.
Slab or pier-and-beam, the aim of foundation drainage on this clay is the same: keep the soil around the house from going soaked on one side and parched on the other, because that is what moves a foundation.
Mart is a small town surrounded by farmland, and a lot on the edge of it can receive runoff from acres of field it does not own. You cannot pipe that. What works is an interceptor swale on the uphill side that catches the sheet flow and carries it around the house and outbuildings, with a drain only where water still collects. On a rural lot with a septic system, keeping that runoff out of the drain field is part of the design, not an afterthought. And because open ground surrounds most of Mart, there is usually a place downhill to daylight a drain by gravity, which we prefer to a pump every time the fall allows it.
Whatever the yard is doing, we bring the full range to Mart:
We cover Mart and the eastern side of McLennan County. Call (254) 272-5068, tell us what the yard is doing, and we will come look at the ground for free.
Free on-site drainage assessments in Mart and across McLennan County. We’ll tell you what’s actually happening in your Blackland clay and what it takes to fix it.