SepticRecord

Lincoln County

Septic services in Taft, Tennessee

Operators based within 12 miles of Taft

Listed by where the business is, not by who it says it serves. Every operator here holds a current state permit, and the address it is placed by comes from the state's own published list — so this is a checkable claim rather than a service-area promise. A Tennessee installer permit is valid statewide, so operators further out can work here too; these are simply the ones closest to you.

Soil and septic suitability around Taft

The USDA has already rated this ground for exactly one use: a septic tank absorption field. Within 4 miles of Taft — 32,005 acres across 55 soil map units — it rates 88.9% of the land very limited for that use and 8.5% somewhat limited, and almost none with no limitation at all.

What the limitation actually is

A rating on its own tells you nothing you can act on. The reasons do, and around Taft the leading one is depth to saturated zone on 60.6% of the mapped area, followed by slow water movement on 42.1%. In full:

Limiting featureShare of areaWhat it means on site
Depth to saturated zone60.6%A seasonal water table sits too close to the surface
Slow water movement42.1%Water moves through the soil too slowly for a drain field to keep up
Slope23.6%The ground is too steep for a conventional field
Depth to bedrock18.5%Bedrock is too shallow to fit a trench above it
Seepage, bottom layer12.5%The layer beneath the trench is porous enough that effluent could reach groundwater without being filtered

Shares overlap: most soils here are limited for more than one reason at once, so these do not sum to 97.4%.

The soils themselves

The named soils and land types that make up most of the ground around Taft. Dickson alone accounts for 26.8% of it.

Soil or land typeShareDrainageSlopeDepth to bedrockSeptic rating
Dickson26.8% Moderately well drained 0 to 12% 72 in Very limited
Taft10.9% Somewhat poorly drained 0 to 5% None in profile Very limited
Hawthorne10.4% Somewhat excessively drained 5 to 50% 26 in Very limited
Mountview7.5% Moderately well drained 2 to 20% None in profile Very limited
Dellrose6.2% Well drained 5 to 45% None in profile Very limited

“None in profile” means SSURGO records no bedrock or other restrictive layer within the depth it describes, not that none exists.

What that means if you are building or repairing here

A seasonal water table

Some of the ground around Taft carries a water table that rises close to the surface for part of the year and is nowhere to be seen for the rest of it. A field built into saturated soil does not treat effluent and does not drain, and the soil does not have to be wet on the day it is looked at for that to be true — the evidence is in the profile, as mottling and grey colours, which is one of the reasons the work is done by someone trained to read a soil pit rather than by timing water in a hole in August.

Slow-draining soil

The ground around Taft holds water. Tennessee measures this as an absorption rate in minutes per inch, and slow soil does not fail a site so much as enlarge it: the slower the rate, the more trench length the same household needs, and past a point a conventional field stops being approvable at all. A slow site is normally still buildable on a low-pressure pipe or drip design, and that is the point at which the installer list matters, because most licence holders in Tennessee are not endorsed for either.

Area of interest: a 4-mile radius around the USGS Geographic Names centre point for Taft (GNIS 1272039, 35.0206, -86.7181), chosen because five of this state's communities are unincorporated and have no boundary to use, and because the lots that need a septic permit are in the ring around a town rather than inside it. Soil from USDA-NRCS Soil Data Access, SSURGO interpretation “ENG - Septic Tank Absorption Fields”, area-weighted by mapped acreage and by each component's share of its map unit. Survey areas: Madison County, Alabama (2025-09-09), Lincoln County, Tennessee (2025-08-29). Retrieved 2026-09-09.

This is a survey, not a soil map for your lot. A permit needs a high-intensity map of the specific parcel, produced by a TDEC-approved soil consultant — see soil map vs perc test.

By service

Permitting in Lincoln County

Septic permitting in Lincoln County is administered by the State of Tennessee, not the county health department. See the Lincoln County detail →