Fence Company in Parker, SC

Anderson Fence Company is a fence company in Parker, SC, working the stitched together mill villages west of Greenville that share one census name and very little else. The Parker CDP counted 13,407 people in 2020, up from 11,431 in 2010 and 10,760 in 2000, and it sits in west central Greenville County with Welcome along its southern edge.

The name comes from a school district rather than a town. The Parker District was organized in 1923 out of the mill village elementary schools on this side of Greenville, Parker High opened the following year, and by the time the district was folded into the Greenville schools in 1951 it covered fourteen communities, most of them mill villages. Each of those villages was laid out by its own mill company, which is why lot widths, street grids and setbacks change as you cross from one former village into the next.

Fourteen village plats, one census name

There is no such thing as a standard Parker lot, and that is the single most useful thing to know before pricing a fence here. A mill company platting a village in 1902 was laying out housing for its own workforce, at whatever spacing suited the land it had bought. The company next door did the same thing on its own terms a few years later. The two grids meet somewhere in the middle, usually at an angle, and the properties along that seam are the awkward ones.

What that means on the ground is simple enough. Assume nothing about the rear dimension of a yard, do not scale a fence off the neighbor's, and find the pins before ordering material. We have measured yards two streets apart in this community that differed by twenty feet in depth, on houses built ten years apart by two different companies.

The mills themselves are largely gone or converted. Monaghan Mill, built between 1900 and 1902 and founded by Lewis Wardlaw Parker and his cousin Thomas Fleming Parker, opened with 25,000 spindles and had expanded to 60,000 and around 700 workers by the end of that decade. It is loft apartments now. The village housing around these mills, however, is still housing, and it is still on its original lot lines.

13,407 peopleLived in Parker at the 2020 census, up from 10,760 in 2000, on housing stock that mostly predates both figures by the better part of a century.

Fencing for owners who do not live there

A large share of Parker households rent rather than own, and that changes who is on the other end of the phone. Plenty of our work here is for landlords and small property companies, and their brief is not the same as a homeowner's. They want a fence that survives tenants, holds up without anyone maintaining it, and can be fixed in a morning between one lease and the next.

That pushes the answer toward chain link more often than it does anywhere else we work. It takes abuse, it does not need staining, a damaged section can be replaced without touching the rest, and black vinyl coated looks acceptable enough from the street to satisfy most expectations. Where wood is wanted, pressure treated pine at ground contact rating with a hardware schedule built for repair beats anything decorative.

• Gate hardware chosen to survive being left open in the wind rather than to look elegant
• Sectional construction, so a damaged bay is a part swap rather than a rebuild
• Heights matched across a portfolio, so one spare stock of material covers several addresses

None of this means a cheaper fence. It means a different set of priorities, and pretending otherwise leads to landlords paying twice for something a tenant was always going to knock about.

Restretch, repair or replace

Most of the chain link standing in Parker has been there for decades, and a fair amount of it is not finished yet. Fabric that has gone slack but is sound can be restretched and retied, terminal posts can be reset, tension bars and bands can be replaced, and a gate that drags can usually be rehung true. That is a fraction of the cost of new.

The point at which it stops being worth it is the bottom selvage. Once the fabric has rusted through along its lower edge it curls away from the tension wire, and no amount of stretching brings it back. The same applies to a post that has corroded at grade: the section above may look fine, but the fence is being held up by habit.

We will walk a line and tell you which sections are which, because on a rental property the difference between a targeted repair and a full replacement is often the difference between doing it this month and putting it off another year.