Decatur County · Jackson & the southwest
Water, fire and mold damage restoration across Decatur County, Tennessee
What a Decatur County address runs into: the State Fire Marshal issues the residential permit for the unincorporated county rather than a local office, plus the towns and the postal codes underneath.
Call (731) 600-1238 All twenty-one counties
- ZIP codes
- 4
- Communities
- 4
- County seat
- Decaturville
- Residential permit
- no county requirement outside the city limits
Permitting varies across this region more than any other thing about it, so the county page is where that question gets answered first.
Decatur County was established in November 1845 out of Perry County territory west of the Tennessee River, which is why the whole county sits on the west bank. It honours Commodore Stephen Decatur. Decaturville was laid out near the center of the county in 1847 and is the seat, though Parsons is the larger town. Eleven thousand people live on three hundred and thirty-four square miles of land and eleven square miles of water.
The Tennessee River forms the eastern county line, dividing Decatur from Perry, and this reach of it is Kentucky Lake — the impoundment behind Kentucky Dam, whose gates closed on 30 August 1944. Kentucky Lake holds a hundred and sixty thousand acres of water, two thousand and sixty-four miles of shoreline and four million acre-feet of flood storage, more than two and a half times the next largest reservoir in the TVA system. The old community of Perryville went under when it filled. The Beech River comes in from Henderson County and passes between Parsons and Decaturville.
The gauge at Perryville reads reservoir elevation rather than natural stage, so its numbers look strange until you know that. Flood stage there is three hundred and sixty-five feet above sea level and major flood is three hundred and seventy-five. The record is 380.9 feet, set on 1 March 1897. The modern record is 378.2 feet on 27 February 2019, which is the flood people here still measure things against and the one worth asking about on any riverside property.
Towns with a page of their own
Also covered here
These communities are bought and covered. What they lack is a documented local story, and inventing one to fill out a template is not something this site is prepared to do.
The absence of a link beside a name here says nothing at all about what was purchased there.
Every covered ZIP code in Decatur County
4 postal codes in Decatur County carry coverage, and not one of them is generalized away.
Decatur County holds four covered postal codes on this site. The seat, Decaturville, answers to ZIP code 38329. Two of them sit under communities with a page of their own; the remaining two appear in the list above, their postal codes beside them. Mold removal is not purchased anywhere in this county, at any code, and no page here will suggest otherwise.
Access is the other half of a response time. Decaturville off State Route 69 and State Route 100; Parsons off Highway 412 and Highway 641. The longest routine run in the county is Decaturville, 55 road miles from Jackson.
| ZIP | Community | Water | Fire | Mold |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 38311 | Bath Springs | held | held | not held |
| 38329 | Decaturville | held | held | not held |
| 38363 | Parsons | held | held | not held |
| 38380 | Sugar Tree | held | held | not held |
Small and mid-sized residential jobs here fall under no local licensing scheme whatever. The state's $25,000 threshold still stands in every county, and the lookup at verify.tn.gov takes about a minute to run.
Permits and licensing in Decatur County
Decatur County is the starkest case on the site. The county has opted out of the residential permit program, neither of its towns is an exempt jurisdiction — Parsons and Decaturville both take the state permit — and there is no county codes department we could find. Outside those two town limits there is no residential building permit and no inspection of any kind unless the owner requests a voluntary state inspection. On structural repair after a flood or a fire, we think that request is money well spent.
No Home Improvement license is required in Decatur County. The state contractor's license applies above twenty-five thousand dollars and verify.tn.gov will confirm one. Decatur County received public assistance in the April 2025 federal declaration and was included in the winter storm declaration that followed. Neither the 2 April 2006 outbreak nor the April 2025 tornadoes produced a documented touchdown inside the county.
Readers who want background rather than coverage should start with the guides linked from the foot of this page.
The rest of this dispatch zone
McNairy, Hardin, Decatur, Henderson and Chester lie a long way from the Mississippi, and pairing them with Madison, Haywood and Hardeman keeps the dispatching honest.
Before you call
Photographs of the contents matter as much as photographs of the structure. Open the drawers, open the closets, and shoot what is inside them before a single box leaves.