hard-pan

Updated: August 31, 2025

Brown and Schaick have, or will have, the control for the whole line of the Salt Lick Pacific Extension, forty thousand dollars a mile over the prairie, with extra for hard-pan and it'll be pretty much all hardpan I can tell you; besides every alternate section of land on this line. There's millions in the job.

Mark Twain - The Gilded Age, Part 2.

And truly I found them, though the way there through the Landes is as melancholy as any great city of sad inhabitants. The desolation of the Landes is an ordered, a commercial desolation. Once the whole surface of the district bore nothing but a scanty herbage. The soil is sand and an iron cement, or "hard-pan," below the sand.

Morley Roberts - A Tramp's Notebook