Fence Company in Pelzer, SC

Anderson Fence Company is a fence company in Pelzer, SC, working a town that spent most of its life under one owner and still shows it in the shape of the lots.

About 1,344 people live in Pelzer. The Pelzer Manufacturing Company put up the first mill on the Saluda River in 1882 and kept adding through the 1890s, and the village that went with it was company built and company owned right down to the houses. Power came off the river, which made this one of the earliest fully electrified mill villages in the South. Locals still call it Mill Town. For a fence crew, the interesting part is what happened in the 1950s, when those houses were sold off to the people living in them.

Lot lines in a town that used to have one owner

When a company village gets carved into private lots, the boundaries get drawn around houses that were never sited with boundaries in mind. Pelzer's houses went into private hands in 1954. The lines that came out of that are frequently narrow, occasionally odd, and the fence that somebody built afterward was often put where it was convenient rather than where the deed said.

So the first thing we do on a Pelzer quote is figure out where the line actually is. Sometimes that is easy and the pins are right there under two inches of dirt. Sometimes the honest answer is that the customer needs a survey before we build anything permanent, and we say so instead of guessing and leaving them with a problem to argue about later.

Things that commonly do not line up here:

• The existing fence, which may sit a foot or more inside one yard or the other
• A hedge or treeline that everyone has treated as the boundary for decades
• A shared drive or a strip of concrete poured across what turned out to be two parcels
• Outbuildings that were sited when the mill still owned everything around them
• Deed descriptions written off features that are no longer standing

Where there is any doubt, we build inside your line by a few inches. Losing a little yard is cheap. Moving a finished fence is not.

Ground that falls toward the Saluda

Pelzer sits on the river, and a fair number of back yards here run downhill. On falling ground a solid fence either steps down in level sections, which leaves triangular gaps under the panels, or it rakes so the boards follow the grade and the gaps close. We walk the run with you and decide which, because the answer depends on how steep the drop is and on whether anything smaller than a Labrador is meant to stay inside it.

The bottom of a sloping yard is where the water ends up. Anderson takes roughly 48 inches of rain in a year, the Cecil clay underneath holds its shape but drains slowly, and the low corner of a Pelzer lot can stay soft for days after a storm. In a corner like that we widen the hole, crown the concrete so water sheds away from the post, and set that post deeper than the line posts on high ground. Skipping any of that is how a fence ends up leaning downhill three winters later.

Gates on a grade need planning rather than luck. A gate that swings downhill catches the ground as it opens, so it either gets hung to swing the other way, gets built shorter at the bottom, or the ground under the arc gets cut down. None of that is complicated, but it has to be decided before the posts go in.