Lauderdale County · Delta & the northwest
Water, fire and mold damage restoration across Lauderdale County, Tennessee
Lauderdale County: the State Fire Marshal issues the residential permit for the unincorporated county rather than a local office, and every postal code the sheet holds inside it.
Call (731) 202-8777 All twenty-one counties
- ZIP codes
- 4
- Communities
- 4
- County seat
- Ripley
- Residential permit
- no county requirement outside the city limits
Communities carrying pages of their own are linked underneath; the remainder are named in a list, because coverage reaches them too.
Lauderdale County was established in 1835 and named for Lieutenant Colonel James Lauderdale, killed at the Battle of New Orleans. Twenty-five thousand people live on four hundred and seventy-two square miles of land and thirty-six of water. The county's boundaries are all rivers: the Mississippi on the west, the Forked Deer on the north against Dyer County, and the Hatchie on the south against Haywood.
The First Chickasaw Bluff is here, above Fulton — the northernmost of the four and the only one anywhere in this dispatch zone. The bluffs are loess, wind-blown Pleistocene silt, and along the river here it reaches something like seventy feet thick before thinning eastward until there is effectively none of it left near the Tennessee River. That single fact explains why the western counties on this site behave one way underfoot and the eastern ones behave another. Fort Pillow State Historic Park, sixteen hundred and forty-two acres on the bluff, is in this county — not in Tipton, where it is frequently placed.
Ripley Power and Light serves Ripley, Halls and Henning according to TVA, while the county's own economic development page lists Forked Deer Electric at Halls. Both may be right in different parts of the same town, and this site is not going to pretend otherwise: on a Halls address we ask which meter it is. Forked Deer Electric Cooperative is headquartered at Halls and serves Dyer, Lauderdale, Crockett and Haywood counties.
Towns with a page of their own
- HallsTwelve road miles down the Highway 51 corridor from Dyersburg makes this the nearest of the Lauderdale towns to the base of the desk, closer than the county seat and easily reached.
- HenningTwenty-five road miles from Dyersburg, mostly on the Highway 51 corridor and then off it, makes this a longer trip than the mileage implies.
- RipleyTwenty road miles south of Dyersburg on the Highway 51 corridor puts the county seat within easy reach, and the approach is direct enough that access is rarely the issue.
Also covered here
For these, the research came back empty in the ways that would have mattered, and a page assembled out of generic material would only make the rest of the site harder to trust.
No page does not mean no coverage, and the difference matters when you are deciding whether to ring.
Every covered ZIP code in Lauderdale County
The table names all 4 codes the site holds across Lauderdale County, service by service.
There are four covered postal codes in Lauderdale County, and the table below is the whole of the list. The seat, Ripley, answers to ZIP code 38063. Three of them sit under communities with a page of their own; the remaining one appears in the list above, its postal code beside it. Mold removal is held at all of them, which is true of only four counties on this site.
The road picture matters as much as the map does. Halls off Highway 51 and State Route 88; Henning off Highway 51 and State Route 87. The longest routine run in the county is Henning, 25 road miles from Dyersburg.
| ZIP | Community | Water | Fire | Mold |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 38037 | Gates | held | held | held |
| 38040 | Halls | held | held | held |
| 38041 | Henning | held | held | held |
| 38063 | Ripley | held | held | held |
The Home Improvement law was not taken up in this county, so between $3,000 and $24,999 nothing county-specific is required of a contractor. The statewide license above $25,000 is, and verify.tn.gov is where to check for it.
Permits and licensing in Lauderdale County
Lauderdale is the only county in this dispatch zone where the State Fire Marshal issues the residential building permit in the unincorporated area. Halls is separately on the state municipal list, Gates has opted out, and Ripley runs its own codes department on Industrial Drive. So the answer to who inspects a rebuild here genuinely depends on which side of a town line the parcel falls on, and the state is more involved in this county than in any of its neighbors.
No Home Improvement license is required in Lauderdale County; the state contractor's license applies above twenty-five thousand dollars. The Alex Haley House Museum at Henning was listed on the National Register on 14 December 1978 and opened as the first state historic site devoted to African American history. Lauderdale County received public assistance in the April 2025 federal declaration.
For the parts of this that do not shift with a county line, the guides are the better read.
The rest of this dispatch zone
Lauderdale, Crockett, Gibson, Weakley, Carroll and Henry sit between the river and the plateau, and they route north rather than toward the southwest.
Before you call
Write down when the water started, not when you noticed it. The gap between those two answers changes a drying plan more than anything else you can tell a dispatcher.