Water, fire and mold damage restoration in Somerville, Tennessee

Take Somerville first and Fayette County second: the town sets the conditions, the county sets the rules. Incorporated 1836 and the seat of Fayette County, with a 2020 population of 3,415 on 13.6 square miles.

Forty road miles east of Memphis on US 64, which runs through the town as Fayette Street. That is the longest run in the Fayette footprint and it is worth being straight about: an hour each way in ordinary conditions and longer with a trailer behind. The compensation is that the highway is also the main street, so once you are here the addresses are simple and there is room to work. Calls from the county around the town add distance in every direction, because seven hundred square miles are served by very few roads.

Two areas produce most of the work. The first is the square and the streets immediately off it, where the buildings are oldest, the services have been replaced piecemeal, and one failure crosses from a commercial first floor to a residential one above. The second is the belt of mid-century housing that grew around it, where the original plumbing and the original ductwork are both reaching an age at which they stop being reliable. New construction is a far smaller share of this town than of Oakland, and it generates correspondingly few calls.

One utility boundary here is unusually specific. Somerville Town Utilities describes its water service as covering most areas north of Highway 64 and outside Gallaway, which makes the highway close to a service line as well as a road, and an address on the south side may be on something else entirely. Natural gas comes from Somerville LG&W on North Main Street. Two organizations, one of which may not serve you at all depending on which side of 64 the house stands, and both worth confirming on a calm day.

Somerville was one of the two towns established in Fayette County by 1826 and has been the seat throughout, so the fabric around the courthouse square is the oldest in the county after La Grange. Beyond the square it is a small county town: mid-century frame and brick, on crawl spaces, with the Loosahatchie running past the north end.

The municipal record for Somerville

Somerville covers 13.57 square miles at 397 feet. Its population peaked at 1,526 in 1860, fell to 777 by 1900, and only passed the Civil War figure again in the 1970s — 2,519 in 2000, 3,094 in 2010, 3,415 in 2020. A century of decline followed by fifty years of slow recovery leaves a stock with almost nothing from the middle of it: old fabric around the square, new building on the edges, and little in between. Somerville Town Utilities supplies gas, water and sewer; Chickasaw Electric Cooperative is headquartered at 17970 Highway 64 in the town.