Cass County

Cass County is defined by a meeting. The Eel rises up in the Fort Wayne country and runs southwest across northern Indiana, through the Whitley, Wabash and Miami county corridor, before joining the Wabash at Logansport. Two river valleys converging in one place shapes everything around them: the terrain, the flood behavior, the soils in the bottoms, and the specific kind of dirt work property owners here end up needing.

Near the rivers the ground rolls and the bottoms flood, and both facts drive the work. Bank cutting, lane and drive crossings over moving water, culverts that were sized for a different era of storm, access roads built into grade, and grading around structures that has to plan for the water the property actually sees rather than the water an average year brings. River bottom soil is productive and it is also the first ground to go under, and a grading plan that ignores that is a plan that gets tested and fails.

Move away from the valleys and Cass County settles into strong, workable farm ground with the familiar needs. Pattern tile where the same wet hole shows up every year, grassed waterways carrying real flow, ditch and outlet maintenance, lanes to farmsteads, and pads for the barns and shops that keep going up. Anything tying into a county regulated drain runs through the surveyor's office and we plan that in rather than around it.

Logansport itself has depth of housing stock, which means decades of settling grades, downspouts discharging where they should not, and yards that drain toward the house because the ground slowly moved that way. These are one to three day jobs with permanent results, and they are the most common residential call we take in a county seat of this size.

Out in the county, Royal Center, Walton, Galveston, Onward, Twelve Mile, Lucerne and Metea are the towns that get skipped. Too small for a contractor to sit in, too far out for one to drive. That is the entire gap our model exists to close, and we do not treat a pad in Walton or a lane rebuild outside Twelve Mile as a favor.

The canal history in Logansport is worth a mention for the same reason it is in Delphi: people have been engineering water in this valley for the better part of two centuries, and some of what is buried out there is older than the maps of it. When we dig near old infrastructure we go carefully and we locate first, which is slower and considerably cheaper than the alternative.