hardpann.adj.

1803 Boston Weekly Mag. 12 Nov. 11/2 The horizontal or allovial [sic] strata of earth..were as follows... 5 feet yellow sand, 16 feet of yellow clay, 17 feet marl..6 inches hard pan, or gravel cemented with marl, 1½ feet fine yellow sand, and three feet coarse slaty gravel.

a1817 T. Dwight Trav. New-Eng. & N.-Y. (1821) I. 374 What is here called the hard pan, a very stiff loam, so closely combined, as wholly to prevent the water from passing through it.

1829 H. Murray Hist. Acct. Discoveries & Trav. N. Amer. II. iii. i. 273 The farmer comes to what Mr. Spafford calls hard-pan, a stiff impenetrable surface on which no vegetable substance will grow.

1872 B. Talbot in Amer. Ann. Deaf July 135 Down in the very hard-pan of ignorance..must the workman prepare a bed for this foundation.

1886 Good Words 27 166/2 Large quantities of loose rock and hardpan.

1928 Bull. Amer. Soil Surv. Assoc. 9 33 Immaturely developed soils may have a hardpan-like horizon.

1963 D. W. Humphries & E. E. Humphries tr. H. Termier & G. Termier Erosion & Sedimentation 406 Hardpan, an English agricultural term (used mainly in the U.S.A., Africa and Australia) for a horizon in podsolic and lateritic soils hardened by precipitation and cementation.

1994 Harrowsmith Aug. 55/1 All you want is to dig up a firm seedbed in the hardpan of your life and make it flourish throughout the summer.

2004 D. Schrock Ortho Home Gardener's Probl. Solver (new ed.) 87 A planting hole in hardpan, even when filled with organic amendments, collects water, creating a basin where roots rot.

1842 Evangelical Mag. 13 May 150/3 I have known Universalism to vegetate and take root on the very hard pan of Orthodoxy, and bring forth fruit.

1857 E. G. Parker Golden Age Amer. Oratory iv. 360 Beecher sometimes goes off in unprepared tangents of eloquent rapture..but soon gets back into the neighborhood of the ‘hard pan’ of his prepared thought.

1870 Harper's Bazar 19 Mar. 182/3 This is not a sentimental world—a practical one, on the contrary. Sooner or later we must all come down to hard-pan.

1921 Naval Appropriation Bill: Hearing before Comm. Naval Aff. (U.S. Senate, 66th Congr., 3rd Sess.) 140 My father brought me down to hardpan by saying, ‘What do you think the burglar is going to be doing.’

1969 European Stars & Stripes (Darmstadt, Germany) 22 May 13/4 To get right down to hardpan, had the North extended to the South the same magnanimous programs.., there might have been no race problem at all.

1973 Lubbock (Texas) Avalanche-Jrnl. 22 Feb. 6- a/1 The word ‘humility’ comes from the same root word as ‘humus’ does, so you recognize it has to do with a sort of ‘ground-ness’, a return to the hardpan of facts.

1837 Cultivator Apr. 29 It is in vain to attempt to raise Indian corn, in this latitude, in seasons like the two last, upon stiff clays, or upon thin soils of a looser quality reposing upon a clay or hardpan subsoil.

1855 Country Gentleman 15 Feb. 102/1 With the shovel throw on about three inches of the hard-pan earth.

1974 N.Y. Times 12 May v. 15/8 Hayden pushed his drive onto hardpan rough to the right.

2002 F. M. Bradley Gardener to Gardener: 1001 Tips ii. 19 Break up hardpan soil by planting daikon radishes, which have long taproots.

1862 National Preacher Nov. 320 To go down to the bottom of things, and keep going down till you strike what may be properly designated as the hard-pan of fundamental truth.]

1870 J. K. Medbery Men & Myst. Wall St. 212 Hard pan is soon reached, and both old world and new are full of hard-pan capitalists.

1875 People (Indianapolis) 8 May 6/2 I desire to submit..a few hard pan facts for the thoughtful consideration of the numerous readers of the People.

1907 R. W. Service Songs of Sourdough (1908) 77 When a man gits on his uppers in a hard-pan sort of town.

1954 Lethbridge (Alberta) Herald 22 Oct. 17/3 The hard pan facts to be faced was [sic] that the government had to go out to find markets.

1992 Toronto Star (Nexis) 8 Oct. d9 Unplugged's just another word for nothing left to spend. That's the hardpan truth in the case of James McMurtry.