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Peter Williams, Jr. EASTERN FENCE
Celebrating 50 years in business, Eastern Fence was founded by Peter Williams, Sr., in 1971. Involved in the story are two doctors, a Canadian wood mill, and a family with tenacity built into their DNA. Read on to see how the business overcame challenges and is a thriving testament to hard work and savvy decisions. They recently celebrated their first acquisition with plans for more in the future. HOW DID EASTERN FENCE BEGIN AND WHAT WAS THE CLIMATE OF THE FENCING INDUSTRY AT THE TIME? When my father, Peter Williams, Sr., founded Eastern Fence, he was 28 years old. He had worked for nine years as a retail salesman selling installed fences, then he worked for one season for a wood mill selling direct to fence companies on eastern Long Island. In 1971, the two doctors who owned the Canadian mill decided to shut it down, leaving him without a job and two children at home. The doctors offered to sell him the 14’ flatbed truck, forklift, some office equipment and a little inventory for $14,000, agreeing to give him time to pay for it. They also gave him $2,000 as start-up money. My father called his younger brothers, John, Bob, and Mike, and offered them jobs. They came from a blue collar, hard-working Irish family of 10 and dove in, not sure of what they
Eastern’s first location
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were doing or where they were heading. The doctors had an industrial building located on route 112 in Medford and after my father took over, it was obvious he could not afford the rent. The doctors also owned a very small summer cottage about a mile up the road that sat on three acres, so that became the office location. Our first warehouse was a burned out 10’x 40’ house trailer they found in Westhampton and dangerously re-located it to the new location. The first couple of years were a total disaster, the property would have been great for growing potatoes, but was not so good for a forklift. Somehow, my father came up with enough money to have stone spread into the yard, and now we were in business. In the first few years, my father would be out most of the day trying to create sales. He could not afford a car and would borrow Bob’s. My uncles tell me they can still hear Bob yelling for my father to get back to the office after we closed for the day so he could go home. The industry at that time was very different from today. The only products used were SCH 40 and SCH 30 galvanized pipe, galvanized and mostly green fabric, cedar stockade, bark-on stockade, redwood basketweave, and post and rail and farm fencing. My uncles have fond memories of sitting around my father’s picnic
table after dinner and coming up with ideas on how to succeed. They offered free delivery with no minimum – Eastern still offers this today. Another idea was to put Budweiser in the Coke (soda) machine at the front counter. It kept contractors coming back over and over.
This is the second company truck. From left to right are my uncles Mike and Bob, me, my Uncle John, and our first driver, Wayne Keller.
We hired our first full-time driver, Mike’s friend Wayne Keller, who proudly drove and delivered for Eastern until retiring just last year. Another person who guided us in the right direction was a true fence man, Charlie Schmans. He had worked with my father in his retail salesman days prior to Eastern. Charlie had been a national salesman for another company and knew fencing inside and out. He went on to become our sales manager; we could not have achieved our success without his early guidance. Our third year put us over the top and that is when my father knew we would make it.
