West sits on I-35 in northeastern McLennan County, a Katy Railroad townsite platted in 1881 and incorporated in 1892. Old lots, old grades and deep cotton clay - that is the drainage picture.
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West sits on I-35 in northeastern McLennan County, a Katy Railroad townsite platted in 1881 and incorporated in 1892. Old lots, old grades and deep cotton clay - that is the drainage picture.
The Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad came through in 1881, Thomas West opened his store in 1883 and by 1900 the town had a cotton mill, several gins, a bank and by some estimates 2,000 residents. The railroad and available university land then brought the Czech and German families whose names are still on the bakeries and the meat market. West has been a going concern for well over a century, and its town core reflects it: lots platted before anyone thought about stormwater, grades set by hand, and decades of additions built on top.
That history is the reason a West yard drains the way it does. The original fall was toward the nearest street or ditch, and every garage, carport, porch slab and fence built since has had a chance to interrupt it.
The Handbook lists cotton and small grain as the area's chief crops, along with cattle, and the soil explains why. The Blackland clays mapped through this part of the county - Houston Black and its close relative Heiden - are nearly all under cultivation where they have not been built on. They are magnificent farm soils and stubborn yard soils: 40 to 60 percent clay, very slow permeability, and cracks that the NRCS says stay open 90 to 150 days in a normal year.
Heiden in particular forms gilgai, a natural microrelief of low mounds and shallow basins created by the clay's own swelling and shrinking. If you have a wet patch in the middle of an otherwise flat lawn with no obvious cause, that may be what you are looking at - the ground itself, not a broken pipe.
On the older streets in West, the most common fix is not a big trench. It is restoring a few inches of fall in the first ten feet around the house with regrading, then burying the downspouts so a hundred-year-old roofline stops dumping its water at the corners. Where a low spot has nowhere to go - hemmed in by a neighbor's fence and a driveway - a French drain collects it and carries it to the street.
If your house is pier-and-beam rather than slab, it brings its own question: is water getting under the house? Foundation drainage for a crawl space means keeping surface water out of it entirely, not just steadying the moisture around a slab.
Move a few blocks out from the core and West turns into farm country fast. If your lot backs up to a field, a share of the water in your yard after a storm started as sheet flow off that field. An interceptor swale along the property line, graded to carry it around the house rather than through the yard, is usually the right first move - buried pipe alone cannot keep up with that volume on clay. Where a barn, shop or septic drain field sits between the field and the house, the swale is routed to keep runoff off all of them, since a saturated drain field on this soil takes weeks to recover.
Whatever the yard is doing, we bring the full range to West:
Town lot on the old plat or a place out past the city limits, we cover West and the north end of McLennan County. Call (254) 272-5068 and we will set up a free visit to walk the yard with you.
Free on-site drainage assessments in West and across McLennan County. We’ll tell you what’s actually happening in your Blackland clay and what it takes to fix it.