Fence Company in Slater-Marietta, SC

Anderson Fence Company is a fence company in Slater-Marietta, SC, and the ground here is the first thing we talk about. The census designated place sits along the North Saluda River in northern Greenville County, up where the Piedmont starts climbing toward the Blue Ridge escarpment, and very little of it is flat.

The population was 1,873 at the 2020 census, down from 2,176 in 2010 and 2,228 in 2000. That is a settled community, not a growing one, and it shows in the work. Slater was built as a company village. H. N. Slater bought 466 acres up here in 1927 to put up a textile mill and the houses to go with it, and in 1934 he added Slater Hall as the village community center. Those houses are still lived in, and a lot of the fences around them are on their second or third round.

Stepped or raked, and why it matters here

A fence on flat ground is a repeating unit. A fence on a grade is a series of decisions. There are two honest ways to handle a slope, and they look and cost different.

• Stepping: each panel stays level and drops a few inches from the last, leaving a triangular gap under the low end of every panel. It suits rigid preassembled panels and it is cleaner to build, but the gaps have to be dealt with on a dog fence
• Raking: the rails follow the grade and the pickets stay plumb, so the bottom of the fence stays tight to the ground the whole way. It takes more cutting and more layout time, and it is the right call on any run where something has to stay in or out
• Regrading a shallow run so a stepped fence sits closer to the dirt, which is sometimes cheaper than either

Aluminum solves part of this on its own. Rackable aluminum panels pivot at the pickets and follow a moderate slope without stepping at all, which is why we reach for it on the steeper yards up here even when the house would otherwise call for wood.

Slope also decides where water goes. Cecil clay drains slowly, and on a grade the water that does not soak in runs along the fence line instead. Posts at the bottom of a run sit wetter than posts at the top, and they are the ones that fail first. We set the low end with that in mind rather than treating every hole on the line the same.

Village lots and hillside lots in the same zip code

Inside the old village the houses sit on a grid of small, similar lots, built to one plan. Fence runs are short, the neighbors are close, and matching what is already up next door keeps a street from looking piecemeal. Chain link and modest wood privacy do most of that work, and the gate sizing matters because there is one way into most of those back yards.

Climb out of the village and the job changes entirely. Parcels get bigger, driveways get longer, and the property line runs off into hardwood where the survey pins are under a foot of leaf litter. On those lots we often clear and flag the line before we can price the fence properly, because a run through standing timber is a different job from a run across mowed grass.

Deer are a real factor up here rather than a talking point. A garden or an orchard backing onto woods needs height, seven to eight feet, or it needs to be a small enclosure done properly rather than a large one done cheaply. A four foot garden fence in this part of the county is a suggestion.

1,873 people in 2020Down from 2,228 in 2000, so the work here leans toward replacing and repairing fence lines that are decades old rather than fencing raw lots.