Century old pier and beam downtown, slab subdivisions on the edges, and prairie soil that changes with every rise in the road.
Claremore is the Rogers County seat and it shows in the housing. You've got a downtown grid of homes from the 1910s through the 1950s sitting on hand set piers, a ring of 1960s and 1970s ranch houses on early slabs, and new subdivisions going up fast on the south and east sides. Three eras, three foundation types, one set of soil that doesn't care what year your house was built.
We cover all of Claremore. That's the older blocks around Lynn Riggs Boulevard and J.M. Davis Boulevard where Route 66 ran through town, the streets off 9th and Dorothy where the old Radium Town bathhouses used to stand, the neighborhoods below Rogers State University and around the Will Rogers Memorial, and the mid century houses along Blue Starr Drive. On the newer side we work Timberlake and the acreage lots around Claremore Lake, Cedar Springs off Old Highway 88, King Ridge, the Pinecrest and Cedarwood streets, and the new builds along Highway 20 heading east. We also cover the county roads out toward Verdigris, Inola, and Oologah.
Claremore sits in what soil scientists call the Cherokee Prairies, and two of the soil series mapped here are named for the town and for Catoosa down the road. The Claremore series is a shallow silt loam that hits limestone bedrock at 10 to 20 inches. The Catoosa series is the deeper cousin, 20 to 40 inches of silt loam and clay loam over the same limestone. Both sit on the ridgetops and gentle rises. They move some, but not a lot, because there's rock right under them.
The trouble soils are in between. Summit clay sits on the side slopes below the ridges and runs over 35 percent clay. Dennis and Parsons soils fill the flats and draws, formed from weathered Pennsylvanian shale, and they're the same expansive stuff that gives Tulsa its foundation problems. Those soils drain slow, stay soggy through spring, and crack open in a summer like 2022 or 2024. A house that straddles a ridge and a draw gets the worst of both.
The difference from Tulsa is that most of Claremore has rock within reach, which makes pier work more predictable than it is in the deep clay south of the river. For the full picture of what expansive clay does to a slab, read why Tulsa soil causes foundation problems.
Downtown and the older east side are mostly pier and beam. Some of those piers are brick, some are native sandstone stacked dry, and a few are old cedar posts that have been in the ground since statehood. Crawl spaces are shallow and often vented straight to the weather, so the wood takes on moisture every spring. Houses from the 1960s forward are slab on grade with grade beams 18 to 24 inches deep, which puts them right in the active soil layer on any lot that isn't on rock. The newest subdivisions are post tension slabs on cut and fill lots, and the fill side is where we get the calls.
Pier and beam releveling in the downtown grid, where a hundred years of seasonal movement has tilted the piers and sagged the floors toward the center of the house. Sill plate rot near the older creek crossings. Corner settlement on 1970s slab houses after the 2024 dry summer. And new build calls off Highway 20, where year two or three settlement on the fill side shows up as a crack over the garage door.
For the old pier and beam homes we jack the beams back to level, shim the piers that are still sound, replace the ones that aren't with new concrete pads, and add piers where the original builder spaced them too far apart. Pair that with crawl space encapsulation and the floor stays put. For slab houses we use push piers on ridge lots where limestone is close, and helical piers on the clay flats and fill lots where we need to screw down to a known torque. Sunken driveways, porches, and garage floors get polyurethane foam leveling, usually done in a morning. If you're trying to figure out which foundation type you have, our guide to pier and beam versus slab in Oklahoma will help.
Claremore jobs typically run inside the same range as the rest of the Tulsa metro:
We give written quotes after a free inspection. No phone estimates.
Yes, and it's usually the most cost effective foundation work we do. We go under the house, jack the beams back to level, shim or replace the piers that have sunk, and pour new pads where the old brick or rock piers have crumbled. Most downtown Claremore pier and beam jobs take one or two days.
Not quite. Tulsa proper is mostly deep clay. Claremore is Cherokee Prairie, where shallow limestone and shale sit close to the surface on the ridges and the deep clay collects in the draws and creek bottoms. The ridge soil moves less. The low ground moves more. Which one you're on changes the repair.
The acreage lots around the lake, like Timberlake, are mostly wooded with big oaks and hickories close to the house. Those trees pull a lot of water out of the soil in July and August, and the side of the slab nearest the trees drops. Tree roots and poor drainage cause more trouble out there than the lake itself.
Fast subdivision builds on cut and fill lots usually show their first movement in years two through five. If the fill on the low side of the lot wasn't compacted in lifts, it settles under the slab and that corner drops. It's common in new neighborhoods off Highway 20 and Old Highway 88. The fix is piers to carry that corner down to native soil.
No. Claremore is 30 minutes up Route 66 or the Will Rogers Turnpike. Inspections are free and written quotes are the same price as anywhere else in the Tulsa metro.
Other locations: Catoosa | Collinsville | Owasso
We come look, you get a written quote. No pressure.