GLADSTONE

Gladstone is a post war suburb, incorporated in 1952 and largely built out over the twenty years after that. Almost everything is a ranch on a full basement, with block walls and the shallow footings that were normal at the time.

North of the river the soil is loess over clay, which drains better than the ground south of the river right up until it does not, and then it moves. Sixty and seventy year old block walls in this part of Clay County are the most common thing we are called out to look at.

Gladstone is a smaller part of our records — a dozen jobs and counting — but it shares its soils with Liberty and the wider northland, where we have worked a great deal more. We know this ground well enough to tell you what we expect to find.

What the ground under Gladstone is actually doing

Under Gladstone the survey finds Sharpsburg across nearly a fifth of the city, then Knox, then Snead. The first two are gentle at 3.2 to 4.8; Snead is the outlier at 7.8 and 45% clay — the most active reading of any soil we have measured in the northland.

Most of Gladstone is therefore on calm ground with an energetic minority mixed in. That is worth knowing because it argues against the assumption that a neighbour’s foundation problem predicts yours. Here, quite often, it does not.