Sullivan County

Sullivan County looks flat on a map and mostly is. Half of it sits inside a band about sixty feet deep, between four hundred eighty and five hundred forty feet, and the Wabash bottoms along the west edge run about four hundred twenty-five to four hundred forty. Ladd Hill, at about six hundred thirty feet, is the high point most people would call natural ground, though several hundred acres of the county stand above it and most of that is spoil. That is the county as the weather made it, and it is gentle ground to work.

Then there is the county as the draglines made it, and the numbers are worth sitting with. The single highest point in Sullivan County is around seven hundred six feet, and it is a spoil pile. The single lowest point is about two hundred fifty-two feet, and it is the floor of an open pit cut two hundred fifty to nearly three hundred feet below the fields around it. Between those two the county holds four hundred fifty-four feet of relief, and both ends of that number were made by a machine. Nobody quoting work here should treat a published contour as current.

That is the first thing to understand about this county and the honest reason it is different from anywhere else we work. Sullivan is not a place that used to mine coal. Sullivan is still mining coal, and in 2024 and in 2025 it was second in Indiana by production, behind Gibson only. The Bear Run operation in the south end of the county has been running since 2010. Neighboring Greene County, by contrast, has no producing mine and reported no tonnage at all over the same period. So in Sullivan you can find hundred-year-old ungraded spoil bank with an open highwall on it, and modern permitted ground graded back to an approved plan under bond, within a few miles of each other, and the difference between those two is most of the price of a job.

The state publishes a county mine map, and it is the right place to start and the wrong place to stop. It carries more than ninety numbered surface mine locations, its data was compiled through December of 2011, and it says in its own margin that some mine locations are approximate and incomplete. On ground that is still being worked, a map from 2011 is history rather than survey. We read it, then we dig a test pit, and we tell you what came out of the hole rather than what the map said.

Away from the mined ground, the thing that shapes the work is water sitting where you do not want it. About four acres in ten across this county are somewhat poorly drained or worse. The largest soil here by a wide margin is Reesville, a silt loam that perches a water table within a foot and a half of the surface through winter and spring. Ava and Cincinnati, both common on the rolling ground, carry a fragipan, which is a dense brittle layer a couple of feet down that water will barely move through. It is why side hill seeps show up where nobody expects them, why septic fields fail on slopes that look well drained, and why the honest answer about scheduling in this county is often a season rather than a week.

One soil deserves a warning of its own. Alford is deep loess, sometimes more than twelve feet of it, well drained and easy to cut, and in our experience it will stand in a near vertical face long enough to fool a person. Then it fails. Deep loess with no coarse material in it is the kind of ground that pipes and gullies, and it is why a bank that held all summer opens up in one thunderstorm. Excavation walls in this county get benched or shored on their merits, not on how they looked at lunchtime.

Ponds here need a plan rather than a hope. Fewer than one acre in a hundred across Sullivan is ground that will hold a pond on its own terms, and better than half of the county is rated poor material for building the bank itself. Seepage through the floor and unsuitable borrow for the bank are the normal condition here, not the exception. That does not mean a pond will not work. It means the floor usually needs a compacted clay liner or imported material, the bank usually needs material chosen rather than material handy, and both of those are cheaper decided before the machine starts than after the water leaves.

The existing water tells its own story, and it is a public story rather than a private one. The national inventory carries twenty-nine structures here, tenth most of any county in Indiana, and every one of them that has a type on record is built out of earth. Sixteen of the twenty-nine belong to one system: the Busseron Watershed flood control dams, owned by local government, built between 1961 and 1976. Sullivan County Park and Lake is one of them, a four hundred sixty acre lake finished in 1968 and designed by the Soil Conservation Service, and it is a built flood control impoundment rather than an old mine pit. Turtle Creek Reservoir, the fifteen hundred fifty acre water in the southwest, is a power plant cooling reservoir. The Greene-Sullivan State Forest alone holds better than a hundred twenty strip pit lakes, and those genuinely are old mine ground. There is more pit water scattered outside the forest, so do not assume a pond is natural just because it is not in the forest.

Two practical rules come out of that inventory. The median dam in this county stands twenty-seven feet with better than a square mile of drainage above it, which puts the typical existing structure past two of the three numbers the state's dam safety chapter turns on. Twenty-five of the twenty-nine are recorded as state regulated. If you build something at that size it very likely carries inspection obligations, and that is a conversation to have before the dirt moves. The state also has to sign off on work inside the floodway wherever a square mile or more drains to it, and along the Wabash and the Busseron system that reaches across a lot of this county. There is a narrow crossing exemption up to five square miles for farm and residential use, and it carries four conditions that all have to hold at once, with the burden of proving it on whoever built the crossing.

The rest is ordinary good work in a farming county. Field tile and surface drainage on the Reesville and Iva flats, waterways and grade repair, pads and lanes, driveway rebuilds, clearing on ground that has grown back, and flood aware work in the Wabash and Busseron bottoms, where about fifteen acres in a hundred flood often enough to be mapped for it. Anything touching a regulated drain goes through the county surveyor's office at 100 Courthouse Square in Sullivan, which staffs the drainage board. Ask them about the drain inventory rather than hunting for it online. That call happens before a quote goes out, not after.