Retaining walls in New Gloucester, Maine.

New Gloucester's terrain rolls from the Royal River valley up onto till ridges, and many houses sit on sites cut into a hillside to make room for a foundation, a driveway and a septic field. The cut has to go somewhere, and a retaining wall is often what turns a raw bank into a usable yard or a level parking pad.

We build granite veneer walls, natural boulder walls and segmental block walls. What holds each one up in this town is mostly what is behind it and under it, and the soil survey tells a lot of that story before the first stone is set.

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What the wall is holding back

Paxton and Woodbridge soils are common on New Gloucester's uplands. Paxton formed in lodgment till and carries a very firm, brittle dense layer starting roughly 20 to 40 inches down, per its NRCS series description. Water perched on that layer moves sideways through the looser soil above it, straight toward the back of any wall cut into the slope.

Lamoine and Suffield soils in the valleys are silt and clay. Suffield is mapped here on eroded 8 to 25% slopes, and fine-textured soils like these hold water and push hard when saturated or frozen. Behind a wall on either kind of ground, clean drainage stone, a perforated drain with an outlet to daylight and filter fabric against the native soil are what keep water pressure off the face.

Stone, ledge and footings

The Paxton very stony and Charlton very stony map units, along with rocky Lyman-Abram ground, mean fieldstone and boulders often come out of the excavation itself. Sorted and set, those stones can become part of a boulder wall rather than a disposal problem. Where ledge sits close to the surface, a wall can bear on rock; where it does not, a compacted gravel footing below the frost-heave zone is the base.

Taller walls, walls carrying a driveway and terraced walls on steep grades need engineering and a planned drainage path. Block walls with geogrid tie-backs suit higher loads; granite veneer over a structural core suits an entry or a front walk.

Walls near water and wetland

The town's erosion standards bar grading or filling on slopes steeper than 25% within 130 feet of a great pond, river, stream, brook or wetland unless it is needed to protect the shoreline. In the shoreland zone, vegetation within 75 feet of most water bodies, and 100 feet of Sabbathday Lake, is held to a buffer standard. A wall near the water starts with the Code Enforcement Officer and a sediment plan, not with the excavator.

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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 New Gloucester, Maine.

Retaining Walls in nearby towns

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Sources for the local facts on this page

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