What are foundation conditions like in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma?

Reviewed by Preston · Updated 2026-11-12

In short: About 34% of Pauls Valley is mapped in soils rated high shrink-swell and 20% moderate ¹.

What does the soil survey show for Pauls Valley?

Pauls Valley covers about 8 square miles ² and had 5,992 people in the 2020 Census ².

Which soils matter most for houses in Pauls Valley?

• Keokuk, about 13% of the area ¹: Very deep, well drained, moderately permeable flood plain soils that formed in loamy and sandy alluvium ³.
• Renfrow, about 13% of the area ¹: Very deep well drained soils that formed in material weathered from clayey shale of Permian age ⁴.
• Grainola, about 11% of the area ¹: Moderately deep, well drained soils that formed in material weathered from shale of Permian age ⁵.
• Asher, about 11% of the area ¹: Very deep, moderately well drained, slowly permeable soils that formed in loamy alluvium ⁶.
• Lela, about 6% of the area ¹: Very deep, somewhat poorly drained soils that formed in clayey alluvium ⁷.
• Urban land, about 6%, is ground the survey maps as covered by buildings and pavement rather than classifying its soil ¹.

What does this mean for houses in Pauls Valley?

Clay that swells and shrinks. Where high shrink-swell soil sits under a house, wet spells lift the slab edges and drought drops them, and uneven watering does more harm than uniform change. See perimeter wetting heave, edge drop in drought and tree-root drying.

Which soils cover Pauls Valley?

Looking for a foundation company near Pauls Valley?

Companies that serve Pauls Valley can appear on the company map in the Homeowner Hub. Paid listings there are marked Sponsored; the library and the AI guide don't rank or recommend any of them.

Buying or selling a house in Pauls Valley? Realtors who serve the area can be on the same map, also marked Sponsored, and for realtors covers the seller disclosure form, inspections and the sale timeline. Seeing cracks at home? Start with for homeowners.

How were these numbers measured?

We overlaid the city limits from the Census Bureau ² on the USDA soil survey's map units ¹ and added up the area of each soil. Where a map unit is a mix of soils, its area was split by the percentages the survey lists for its major soils, so shares leave out minor inclusions and do not add to 100%. Shrink-swell is rated by the linear extensibility of a soil's most expansive layer, the survey's measure of how much it changes length between wet and dry (6% or more is high). Water table, bedrock and flooding come from the survey's map-unit summaries: the shallowest water table in any month, the shallowest bedrock, and the most common flooding frequency. Bedrock here includes soft, weathered sandstone and shale that a pier can push through, so it is not the depth where piers stop. These are mapped averages, not a test of any one lot; fill, grading and the soil actually under a house can differ, which is why a site visit or soil boring still decides a repair.

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