Fence Company in Berea, SC

Anderson Fence Company is a fence company in Berea, SC, the largest of the unincorporated communities northwest of Greenville with 15,578 people counted in 2020 across roughly 7.7 square miles of land. It sits about six miles out from the city at the foot of Paris Mountain, strung along White Horse Road, and it takes its name from a Baptist church organized in 1843 after the Bereans of scripture.

That matters to a fence quote more than it sounds. Berea was never a company village. The first settlers came in as farmers after the Revolutionary War, working the ground between the Saluda River and Paris Mountain, and everything since has been subdivided off that farmland in pieces, decade by decade. No mill drew a grid here, so the lot shapes, road frontages and house eras change from one property to the next.

No two lots alike, and what that does to a fence

Drive one Berea road end to end and you pass a 1940s frame cottage on a deep narrow strip, a brick ranch from 1972 on three quarters of an acre, a pair of houses sharing an old farm driveway, and an infill build from the last ten years on a lot carved out of somebody's side yard. They are neighbors, and not one of them has the same boundary story as the next.

So the usual opening question in this community is not which fence you want, it is what you are actually fencing to. On the same job we will commonly find a chain link fence from the seventies on one side, nothing at all on another, and a new vinyl run on the third put in by a neighbor last spring. Those three do not meet at the same heights, the same setbacks or the same line.

• Where a neighbor's fence already stands, we can tie into it, run parallel and inboard of it, or leave a maintenance gap, and each of those has consequences worth understanding first
• Where the old line is barbed wire or field fence left from pasture days, it is a clue to the boundary and not proof of it
• Where an infill lot was carved out recently, the pins are usually fresh and easy to find, which makes that side the simplest to build
• Where a shared driveway crosses the line, the gate location matters more than the fence material

15,578 peopleLived in Berea at the 2020 census, spread over about 7.7 square miles, which is why lot sizes on a single road can run from a quarter acre to several.

Water comes downhill from Paris Mountain

The north end of Berea rises toward Paris Mountain, and even where a yard looks flat there is usually a fall across it. After a heavy week that fall becomes a path, and water finds the same route through the back of a lot every time. Put a solid six foot privacy fence straight across it and you have built a dam with a picket face.

What happens next is predictable. Leaves and silt stack against the bottom boards, the wood stays wet, the ground line rots first, and after a big storm the fence either bows or a section lifts. We have pulled fences out of Berea back yards that failed for no other reason.

The fixes are not expensive if they go in at build time. Leave deliberate clearance under the bottom rail at the low point, run a short open section of picket or welded wire where the water crosses, or step the grade under the fence so the flow has somewhere to go. The Upstate takes about 48 inches of rain a year against a national average of 38, and none of that water asks permission to cross a property line.

Unincorporated ground, and who actually sets the rules

There is no Berea town hall and no Berea fence ordinance. This is unincorporated Greenville County, so what governs your fence is the county, your recorded plat, and any restrictive covenants that came with the deed. South Carolina writes no statewide fence permit and sets no state height limit, which leaves all of it local.

In practice the documents that decide a Berea job are the plat and the easements on it. Older subdivided farmland tends to carry rights of way nobody thinks about: a utility strip along the road frontage, a shared drive easement, occasionally a drainage right across the rear. We read those before we mark a line, and we set the fence back off an easement rather than across it, because a fence built over a utility easement is a fence somebody else is entitled to remove.