Fence Company in Cleveland, SC

Anderson Fence Company is a fence company in Cleveland, SC, working the mountain end of Greenville County where US 276 and Highway 11 cross, a little under nine miles north northwest of Travelers Rest. The community has had its own post office since 1900, and the 2020 census counted about 1,347 people spread across it.

Cleveland is the last settlement before the escarpment. Caesars Head State Park and its 3,215 foot summit sit above it, and the Mountain Bridge Wilderness Area, which takes in Jones Gap State Park and Wildcat Wayside alongside Caesars Head, wraps around a good deal of the surrounding land. Nobody up here has a flat rectangular lot, and that single fact drives every fence decision we make in Cleveland.

Digging in mountain ground

An auger that spins freely all day across an Upstate subdivision will stop dead in the first hour up here. Under the leaf mold and the thin soil there is rock, and where there is not rock there is often steep ground that a machine cannot safely sit on. So a Cleveland fence line gets dug three ways: machine where we can, two man auger where we cannot, and bar and breaker where the hole has to be made rather than drilled.

That matters to a quote more than the material does. Two hundred feet of cedar privacy on level ground and two hundred feet of the same fence up a wooded bank are not the same job, and we do not pretend otherwise on the estimate. What we do promise is that the post goes to full depth or we change the approach and tell you what we changed.

Slope also decides how the fence meets the ground. Stepping each panel level and dropping it down the hill is quick and looks orderly, but it leaves a wedge shaped gap under the low end of every section, and on a mountain lot that gap is a doorway for anything on four legs. Raking, where the rails follow the grade and the pickets stay plumb, keeps the bottom tight to the dirt the whole way. We rake anything that has to contain, and we step only where a gap costs nothing.

Rackable aluminum is worth a mention here because it handles moderate grade on its own. The panels pivot at every picket and follow the fall of the land without a single cut, which on a steep front yard often gives a better result than wood for less labor.

Weather at the top of the county

Fences in Cleveland deal with things that fences in Greenville never see. Ice loads limbs until they come down on a fence line. Wind funnels along the ridges and pushes on a solid privacy panel like a sail. Runoff from an uphill neighbor's property crosses your line during a hard rain, and the Upstate gets plenty of those, with the region averaging around 48 inches a year.

The design answers are simple and worth paying for. Shorten post spacing on exposed runs rather than stretching it. Use shadowbox or a spaced picket where wind is a problem, because a fence that lets air through does not get pushed over. Keep the fence line out from under the worst of the overhanging hardwood where you have a choice, and expect to repair a section every few years where you do not.

A lot of property up here is a second home, a cabin or a rental, and stands empty for stretches at a time. That is an argument for materials that need nothing done to them. Chain link, aluminum and cedar all go months unattended without complaint. Untreated pine left to weather on a damp shaded mountain lot does not, and South Carolina sits in one of the heaviest termite pressure zones in the residential code on top of that.

3,215 feet at Caesars HeadThe summit above Cleveland, which is a fair reminder that the ground under a fence up here is nothing like the ground under one in town.