Fence Company in Conestee, SC

Anderson Fence Company is a fence company in Conestee, SC, a small village on the Reedy River just south of Greenville that the census first counted on its own in 2020, at 904 people. It grew up around the mill, and the mill is still the landmark: the Reedy was dammed here around 1892 to power it, and the building is on the National Register.

The other landmark is newer. Conestee Nature Preserve opened in 2006 and covers roughly 400 acres along three miles of the Reedy, with about thirteen miles of trail through it and more than 223 bird species recorded, enough for the National Audubon Society to designate it an Important Bird Area of Global Significance. Living next to that much protected bottom land is pleasant, and it makes fencing here a particular kind of problem.

Building on river bottom

Anywhere in the Upstate a post hole in Cecil clay holds water, because kaolinite heavy clay drains slowly and the region takes around 48 inches of rain a year against a US average of 38. Down along the Reedy that general problem gets specific. The water table sits higher, low ground stays saturated longer after a storm, and a hole dug in the morning can have standing water in it by afternoon.

Posts do not rot because wood is wet once. They rot because wood stays wet at grade, in the two or three inches where air, water and soil all meet. So the things that matter on a Conestee job are what goes in the ground and how it sits there.

• Ground contact rated lumber for every post, not just the corners, since South Carolina sits in one of the heaviest termite pressure zones mapped in the residential code
• A hole wide enough to take a real concrete collar, crowned at the top so water sheds away from the post rather than pooling around it
• Steel or aluminum posts considered seriously on the lowest sections, because metal does not care how long the ground stays wet
• Bottom rails and pickets held up off the dirt, so the fence is not wicking moisture out of saturated soil all winter
• Gates hung with adjustable hardware, because ground that swells and settles seasonally will throw a gate out of square

We also ask where the water actually goes in a hard rain, and if you have lived here through a wet spring you already know the answer. A fence built across the path of moving water becomes a dam, catching leaves and debris until it takes the load of everything behind it. Leaving a gap, raising a section, or moving the line a few feet uphill costs almost nothing at the layout stage and saves the fence.

Living beside a preserve

Four hundred acres of wooded river bottom next to your property is a permanent supply of wildlife, and deer are the ones that cost you money. A four foot garden fence does nothing. Deer fencing that works runs seven to eight feet, in woven wire or heavy mesh, and on a small area it is very affordable while on a large one it stops making sense fast.

Our usual advice here is to fence the beds and the fruit trees rather than the yard. A properly built enclosure around what you actually care about beats a tall fence around a whole property, both on cost and on how it looks from the house. For the rest of the yard, a shorter fence handles dogs, kids and the boundary.

Where a back line runs up against preserve or greenway land, we set the fence on your side of the line and we find the pins first. A boundary with public or conservation land is exactly the boundary you do not want to guess at, because a fence in the wrong place there is a conversation with an organization rather than with a neighbor.

400 acres and 223 bird speciesRecorded at Conestee Nature Preserve, which is a good place to live next to and a good reason to build a garden fence properly the first time.