Fence Company in Dunean, SC

Anderson Fence Company is a fence company in Dunean, SC, working what is still one of the most intact mill villages in Greenville County. The census counted 3,740 people here in 2020, on streets that were laid out in one go rather than developed piece by piece, and that single fact governs most of what happens on a fence job in this community.

Dunean Mills was organized on 11 March 1911 under Ellison Adger Smyth, and with the engineer J.E. Sirrine and James B. Duke's Southern Utilities behind it the plant became the first fully electric mill and village in the South. Production opened on 12 April 1912 with 50,000 spindles and 1,200 looms. By the 1950s the village around it held 585 houses along with an elementary school, three churches, a store, a theater, a fire station and two ball parks. The company began selling those houses to the people living in them in 1949, and those sales are where today's deeds and property lines come from.

Lot lines drawn by a mill, not a developer

When a company subdivides its own village and sells it house by house, the boundaries land where the survey put them. What people have mown, parked on and treated as their yard for three generations since is a separate question, and the two do not always agree. In Dunean this is the most common complication on a job, and it is the reason the first part of our visit is spent looking for pins rather than talking about materials.

The pattern repeats. Driveways that were shared informally between two mill families are now shared between two owners with no recorded easement. Side yards that look evenly split are sometimes not. A hedge or an old fence planted seventy years ago sits where it was convenient rather than where the line runs. We find what we can, tell you plainly what we found, and build to a survey if you want certainty before we set concrete.

585 housesMade up the Dunean mill village by the 1950s, and the company started selling them to their occupants in 1949. Those sales still set the fence lines today.

Short runs, close neighbors and a six foot problem

Mill houses were built close together on shallow lots, near the street, with a handful of plans repeating down the row. That geometry has consequences for a fence that people do not expect until it is up. Two houses twenty feet apart with six foot solid privacy between them creates a corridor that neither household enjoys, cuts the light out of side windows on both sides, and traps still air against two sets of siding.

The better answer on most of these lots is height used selectively. Four foot picket across the front, which is what the street was built for and what still suits it. Six foot only on the stretch that is actually screening something, typically one back corner or one window line. Open or semi open fencing everywhere else, which on a narrow lot keeps the yard feeling like a yard rather than a run.

Access is the other consequence. There is often no route to the back except past the side of the house, so material is carried and holes are dug by hand more often than not. That is priced in at the quote. A short fence on a tight village lot takes more hours per foot than a long fence on an open one, and quoting it any other way means somebody gets a surprise.

Matching a street that was built to look the same

A mill village street was designed as a set, and a surprising amount of that consistency survives in Dunean. Drop a bright white vinyl panel fence into a row of weathered wood and brick and it announces itself from a block away. That is a matter of taste rather than a rule, and nobody can stop you, but most people who ask us about it would rather the fence disappeared into the street than stood out from it.

What tends to sit right here is wood: picket at the front in a profile that matches the porch detail, privacy behind in cedar or in pine stained rather than left raw. Where a neighbor already has something, we match height and picket spacing where it is sensible to and keep the two fences independent structurally, so replacing one later does not drag the other into it.

One genuinely useful detail about wood on these lots. South Carolina sits in one of the heaviest termite pressure zones mapped in the residential code, so anything touching the ground needs to be rated for ground contact, not just treated. On hundred year old village ground with plenty of buried organic material around old outbuildings, that is not a formality.