Weakley County · Delta & the northwest
Water, fire and mold damage restoration across Weakley County, Tennessee
Weakley County, where the State Fire Marshal issues the residential permit for the unincorporated county rather than a local office — set out community by community and code by code.
Call (731) 202-8777 All twenty-one counties
- ZIP codes
- 7
- Communities
- 7
- County seat
- Dresden
- Residential permit
- the City of Martin building codes office
Where the county runs no codes department, the page says so rather than smoothing it over, because it changes how a rebuild gets documented.
Weakley County was established by the General Assembly on 21 October 1823 and named for Congressman Robert Weakley. Thirty-three thousand people live on five hundred and eighty square miles. Dresden is the county seat, but Martin is about three and a half times its size and is the largest town in the county — a detail that trips up anybody assuming the seat is the center of gravity. The University of Tennessee at Martin, founded in 1927, sits on a two hundred and fifty acre campus there.
Weakley County is at the top of the Obion basin and sits well inland: a square mile and a half of water in five hundred and eighty of land. The forks of the Obion rise in and around it, and the channelization work of the West Tennessee Tributaries Project reached up into this county — the contract to extend the ditch into Weakley was let in 1969, and the litigation that eventually stopped the project began the following spring. Big Cypress Tree State Park near Greenfield is three hundred and thirty acres in the Obion watershed; the cypress it was named for was killed by lightning in 1976 and is no longer there.
The Weakley County Municipal Electric System serves the entire county plus South Fulton and Bradford outside it, about twenty-one thousand customers, which makes this one of very few counties on the site with a single electric answer. Water and sewer come from the five municipalities. Natural gas is the West Tennessee Public Utilities District in Dresden, Gleason, Greenfield and Sharon, and the City of Martin in Martin.
Towns with a page of their own
- DresdenThe concentration here is unusual because much of it was created in a single afternoon.
- GreenfieldForty-five road miles, most of it on good two-lane, with Martin and Dresden both ten miles off and McKenzie fifteen.
- MartinForty road miles from the Dyersburg end of this desk, and the last stretch is the 45E corridor.
Also covered here
Where the public record for a community amounts to a population figure and a code, a page about it would be a page about nothing in particular. They are listed instead.
The absence of a link beside a name here says nothing at all about what was purchased there.
Every covered ZIP code in Weakley County
7 postal codes in Weakley County carry coverage, and not one of them is generalized away.
Weakley County holds seven covered postal codes on this site. The seat, Dresden, answers to ZIP code 38225. Three of them sit under communities with a page of their own; the remaining four 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. Greenfield off Highway 45E and State Route 43. The longest routine run in the county is Greenfield, 45 road miles from Dyersburg.
| ZIP | Community | Water | Fire | Mold |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 38225 | Dresden | held | held | not held |
| 38226 | Dukedom | held | held | not held |
| 38229 | Gleason | held | held | not held |
| 38230 | Greenfield | held | held | not held |
| 38237 | Martin | held | held | not held |
| 38241 | Palmersville | held | held | not held |
| 38255 | Sharon | held | held | not held |
Nineteen of the twenty-one counties on this site skipped the Home Improvement law, and this is one of them, which leaves the $25,000 threshold as the only licensing line that matters. The register sits at verify.tn.gov.
Permits and licensing in Weakley County
Three regimes inside one county, and the difference between them is not academic. Martin runs its own codes office on the 2018 International Codes with local amendments and will not let construction start before the permit is issued and paid for. Dresden, the county seat, takes the state residential permit. Outside the town limits, Weakley County states plainly that it has no building codes or restrictions beyond a twenty-five dollar permit fee, though a permit is still required for a new house, an addition, a mobile home relocation, an in-ground pool or any structure over five thousand dollars.
There is no Home Improvement license requirement in Weakley County. The state contractor's license applies above twenty-five thousand dollars and is worth checking, particularly here. On 10 December 2021 an EF-3 tore through downtown Dresden. It killed nobody and injured five — the deaths in West Tennessee that night came from a different and stronger tornado over in Lake and Obion counties, and conflating the two is the commonest error written about this 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
Ten counties along and behind the Mississippi run to one desk: Lake, Obion, Dyer, Lauderdale, Crockett, Gibson, Weakley, Carroll, Henry and Benton.
Before you call
Bring the deductible figure into the conversation. There is little point scoping a four thousand dollar loss against a five thousand dollar deductible, and finding that out early suits everybody.