Hancock County

Hancock County is the flattest ground we work, and that single fact drives everything else. There is about two hundred and fifty feet between the highest and lowest points, but ninety percent of the county sits inside a band of roughly a hundred and fifty feet, and the standard deviation across the whole county is under fifty feet. In plain terms, fall here is measured in inches per hundred feet rather than in feet. Everywhere else in central Indiana you can usually go find some fall. In Hancock County you have to build it.

The soils make it harder rather than easier. Crosby and Brookston together are about sixty-two percent of this county, which is the highest concentration anywhere we cover. Crosby is somewhat poorly drained and runs C to D for runoff, Brookston is the poorly drained depression soil at B to D, and once you add Sloan, Rensselaer, Kokomo, Westland, Milford and Palms roughly thirty-five percent of the county is poorly or very poorly drained. Those are closed depressions and slack water ground. They do not drain without help and never did.

That combination is why survey precision matters more here than machine size. A quarter inch of grade error over a three hundred foot swale is the difference between an outlet that works and standing water that does not move. We shoot grades with instruments on this ground as a matter of course, and we verify the outlet elevation before shaping anything, because on a half percent grade there is no margin to absorb a mistake.

The county is also growing very fast, second fastest in Indiana by percentage, driven by McCordsville, New Palestine, the Hancock side of Cumberland and Greenfield spilling east out of Indianapolis. Every bit of that is going up on former cropland, and cropland on Crosby and Brookston means the whole county was tiled from the eighteen eighties onward. The surveyor maintains five hundred miles of regulated drain. The private tile under the fields is far larger, carries no tracer wire, is on no map, and the surveyor's office does not probe for it. On a new subdivision lot here, expect to find tile, and expect it to still be carrying water.

Ponds work differently in this county than people assume, and the honest answer costs us the bigger job. The national dam inventory lists exactly three dams in the whole of Hancock County. Three. Meanwhile the soil survey rates about eighty-seven percent of the county only somewhat limited for holding water in a pond reservoir, which is good, and eighty percent very limited for embankments and dikes, which is not. Read those together and the answer is clear: this is dug pond country, not dam country. The ground will hold water once you get down to it, and the material lying here is poor stuff to build a dam out of. Anybody proposing to push up a berm and make you a lake in Hancock County should be asked what they intend to build it from.

One local requirement catches nearly every contractor who does not work here regularly: the Hancock County Surveyor issues county pond permits. That is a Hancock specific step on top of the usual state and federal review, and it is the sort of thing that turns a two week job into a two month one when nobody accounted for it. We plan for it.

The rest of the permitting is also stricter than the state minimum, which is worth knowing before comparing quotes. Hancock runs its own stormwater ordinance with its own technical standards and post development release rates, participates in the flood insurance rating programme, and has drafted erosion hazard mapping for the county and for Greenfield and McCordsville. State stormwater permitting still triggers at an acre of disturbance, and work in the floodway of any stream draining more than a square mile needs state approval on top.

On water, most of the county drains south and east by way of Sugar Creek, Brandywine Creek, Buck Creek, Nameless Creek and Sixmile Creek toward the East Fork White. The northwest corner is the exception and runs to Fall Creek and on to the West Fork White. Two notes people get wrong: this Sugar Creek is not the one out by Crawfordsville, and the Big Blue River is not really this county's river, since only about four and a half miles of it are here. Sugar Creek and Brandywine Creek are. Geist Reservoir does touch the northwest corner near Fortville and McCordsville, and it is owned by the utility rather than the state.

Out east and north through Shirley, Wilkinson and the farm ground the work stays agricultural: tile repair and pattern runs, grassed waterways, ditch and outlet maintenance, pads for pole barns, lanes and clearing. Same wet soils, bigger sites, fewer neighbours to route water past.