Henry County · Delta & the northwest
Water, fire and mold damage restoration across Henry County, Tennessee
The City of Paris Building and Codes department enforces the residential code. The county view — seat, codes authority, licensing and coverage.
Call (731) 202-8777 All twenty-one counties
- ZIP codes
- 7
- Communities
- 7
- County seat
- Paris
- Residential permit
- the City of Paris Building and Codes department; the county requires no building permit and has no zoning outside the city limits
The figure above counts codes with coverage behind them, not every code that happens to fall inside the county boundary.
Henry County was founded in 1821 and named for Patrick Henry. Thirty-two thousand people live on five hundred and sixty-two square miles of land and thirty-one of water. Paris, the seat, has been incorporated since February 1849 and has a seventy-foot replica of the Eiffel Tower in a park on the south side of town — the original wooden one was sixty-five feet and was replaced with the metal structure that stands now.
The eastern side of the county runs down to Kentucky Lake, which is why thirty-one square miles of Henry County is water. Kentucky Dam itself is in Kentucky, on the line between Livingston and Marshall counties, and its gates closed on 30 August 1944; the reservoir behind it holds a hundred and sixty thousand acres of surface water and two thousand miles of shoreline. Lakeside property in this county is on a managed reservoir with a seasonal operating range, which is a different proposition from riverside property on an unregulated stream.
The Paris Board of Public Utilities is the electric distributor for the city and for all of the surrounding county, which is a rare thing on this site — most counties here have two or three. The City of Paris itself supplies electricity, water, sewer and refuse. That makes shutting a building down in Henry County simpler than almost anywhere else covered from this desk.
Towns with a page of their own
Also covered here
These communities are covered and are named here instead of getting pages, because we could not find enough checkable local detail to fill one honestly. A padded page reads as padding, and that is worse than a line in a list.
The absence of a link beside a name here says nothing at all about what was purchased there.
Every covered ZIP code in Henry County
7 postal codes in Henry County carry coverage, and not one of them is generalized away.
Henry County holds seven covered postal codes on this site. The seat, Paris, answers to ZIP code 38242. Two of them sit under communities with a page of their own; the remaining five 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. Puryear off Highway 641 and State Route 140. The longest routine run in the county is Puryear, 85 road miles from Dyersburg.
| ZIP | Community | Water | Fire | Mold |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 38222 | Buchanan | held | held | not held |
| 38224 | Cottage Grove | held | held | not held |
| 38231 | Henry | held | held | not held |
| 38236 | Mansfield | held | held | not held |
| 38242 | Paris | held | held | not held |
| 38251 | Puryear | held | held | not held |
| 38256 | Springville | held | held | not held |
There is no county license for mid-sized residential work in this part of the region. Beyond $25,000 the state license is required statewide, and a search at verify.tn.gov settles whether a given contractor holds one.
Permits and licensing in Henry County
This is the sharpest inside-and-outside contrast in West Tennessee, and it is worth stating flatly. Inside Paris city limits, the city's Building and Codes department enforces the full 2018 International series — building, residential, plumbing, mechanical, fuel gas, existing building, energy conservation and property maintenance — with a digital permit portal. Outside the city limits, Henry County states that building permits are not required in unincorporated areas and that the county has no zoning regulations there either. Commercial premises still answer to the state fire code, and electrical and septic work still needs a state permit. Everything else is between the owner and the builder.
No Home Improvement license is required in Henry County; the state contractor's license applies above twenty-five thousand dollars and a lookup at verify.tn.gov takes a minute. In a county where nobody inspects a rebuild outside the city, that minute is the main check available to an owner. The EF-3 of 10 December 2021 finished its seventy-one-mile run in the Paris Landing area of this county, and Henry received federal assistance after both that event and the April 2025 storms.
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
From Lake County at the Kentucky line down to Benton County at the Tennessee River is a long way, and that distance is the reason this zone stands apart.
Before you call
Do not run the HVAC system if smoke has been through the house. Say on the call whether it has been running, because that answer decides whether the ductwork is in scope.