Retaining walls in Gorham, Maine.
Gorham covers a little over 51 square miles, and its terrain runs from the flat ground around the Village and the Industrial Park on Route 25 to the stream-cut ground across the north and northwest of town. Wherever a driveway, a back yard or a new foundation has been cut into a slope, a wall usually ends up doing the holding.
We build retaining walls in granite veneer, natural boulder and segmental block, each designed around drainage and frost. In Gorham the design questions are practical ones: how much water comes down the slope, whether the wall sits near a stream the town regulates, and whether the lot runs on public sewer or a septic field that the wall has to work around.
Stream valleys, flood zones and setbacks
The town's 2016 Comprehensive Plan maps a network of streams across the northern and northwestern part of Gorham, many with 100-year flood zones along them, and places the largest concentration of wetlands in the northeast. Gorham's code treats land within 75 feet of a stream, and within 250 feet of the upland edge of a freshwater wetland, as shoreland, with its own setbacks and limits on clearing.
A wall that terraces a slope down toward one of those brooks can fall under the same structure setback as a building, and removing vegetation in the buffer is capped by a point system that counts the trees left standing. When the toe of a proposed wall lands anywhere near that line, we confirm the district boundary on the town's shoreland map and plan the wall to stay outside it or to fit what the code allows.
Drainage behind the wall on built-up lots
Census estimates put Gorham's median home at 1988 construction, so about half the town's houses are younger than that, and many of their back yards were leveled with fill and a thin layer of topsoil. Retained soil like that holds water after a thaw, and trapped water plus frost is what pushes a wall out of line. Clean crushed stone behind the face, a perforated drain at the base and an outlet to daylight give that water somewhere to go.
Gorham's performance standards also ask that development fit the natural contour and not alter existing patterns of natural water flow. A tiered boulder wall that follows the grade, rather than one tall wall that forces the slope into a new shape, often satisfies both the engineering and that standard at once.
Granite · Boulder · Block
How we handle retaining walls
Whether it is a granite veneer entry wall with lantern pillars, a terraced boulder slope or a structural block wall behind a new build, we engineer for drainage and frost so the wall you pay for once stands for decades.
See the full retaining walls service page or everything we do in Gorham, Maine.
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