Foundation Repair in Post, TX

What is different about Post

Founded in the early 1900s by cereal manufacturer C. W. Post, the town lies at the foot of the escarpment that marks the eastern edge of the High Plains. Drive down Highway 84 from Lubbock and you descend several hundred feet off the flat surface into the rolling country below. That descent is a geological boundary, not just a scenic one.

Off the Caprock, the Ogallala Formation and its caliche are gone, and the subsurface is Permian-age redbeds — the red clays, shales and sandstones that give this country its color. Those materials behave differently than the windblown sediment above the escarpment. Clay content and plasticity vary considerably over short distances, and a lot in Post can present a soil profile that has little in common with a lot in Lubbock forty miles away.

The terrain differs too. Post has actual slopes and drainage that actually drains, which eliminates the ponding problem that dominates flat Lubbock and replaces it with erosion, runoff concentration and cut-and-fill building pads.

The practical takeaway: do not assume advice calibrated for Lubbock applies here. Site-specific evaluation matters more in Post than in almost any other town in the service area, and it is a fair question to ask whoever comes out whether they have worked below the Caprock before.

Post's historic downtown and older residential core also mean a meaningful amount of early-twentieth-century construction, with pier and beam foundations and the repair approach that goes with them.

Local notes for Post homeowners

The town is below the Caprock because of a surveying problem, which is a better story than it sounds. C. W. Post bought 200,000 acres of J. B. Slaughter's U Lazy S Ranch in 1906 and began building his model colony, Post City, up on the Llano Estacado at the site now known as Close City. Surveyors then established that the location was eleven miles from the geographic center of Garza County, and state law required a county seat to sit within five miles of center. Post halted construction and shifted the whole project to a new site nearer the middle of the county — which happened to be below the escarpment. The town is where it is because of a legal distance requirement, and that accident put it on entirely different ground.

The elevation difference is the largest in this service area and it is worth stating plainly: Post sits at 2,605 feet against central Lubbock's 3,202. That is roughly six hundred feet of drop across a forty-mile drive, and it is not a gentle grade — most of it happens in the few miles where Highway 84 comes off the Caprock. The Double U Company that Post established built trim houses, planted trees down every street and banned alcohol and brothels; the town changed its name from Post City to Post when it incorporated in 1914, the year Post died. Downtown still carries a five-block historic district from that period.

One more piece of local history that is oddly on topic. Between 1911 and 1914, C. W. Post spent something like $50,000 detonating dynamite along the edge of the Caprock in an attempt to make it rain, having read that rainfall often followed heavy artillery in wartime. He started with charges lifted by kites and moved to ground explosions along the escarpment. He kept at it until his death. A century later, drought is still the thing that moves foundations out here — the difference is that the modern remedy is a soaker hose on a schedule rather than explosives.

What we can connect you with here

• Foundation Inspection
• Slab Foundation Repair
• Pier and Beam Repair
• Crawl Space Foundation Repair
• Mudjacking and Slab Jacking
• Drainage and Grading Correction
• Foundation Crack Repair
• Post-Tension Cable Repair