Soil Classification

The soils in Washington County range from loamy to sandy, from shallow to deep, and from very poorly drained to excessively drained. Glaciation is chiefly responsible for the many kinds of soil that formed. It affected the formation of the soils by depositing several kinds of parent material and by sculpturing a wide variety of landforms.

What Soils are on My Property?
Washington County's publicly accessible interactive website includes mapped soils. Here are a few tips on how to find this data:

Scroll down the Layers and open the Soils Folder. Click on the empty box next to the folder you just opened. At this point the SSURGO soils will be turned on. This will be a visible layer...but not at this scale. Zoom in to the area you'd like to view and the layers should then automatically be viewable. GIS Interactive Mapping TIP: Click Off The Auto Refresh Button.

List of Soils
The Land Conservation Office has put together a chart telling you more about Washington County's soils. Each soil symbol, soil name, drainage class, map unit description and suitable prairie seed mixes are found below.

Soil Classification Chart (pdf)

For further explanations of map unit descriptions...refer to the Washington County Soil Survey Book written by the United States Department of Agriculture-Soil Conservation Service.