Tennessee's trusted chimney team

National Chimney Pros started in 2011 with a set of brushes, a small shop, and a founder who grew up mixing mortar. Wade Hensley learned masonry from his father in Sevier County, where wood heat was never a novelty and a chimney that drew poorly was a real problem in January. After a decade repairing fireboxes and rebuilding crowns for other contractors, he opened his own shop in Knoxville with a simple idea: treat every chimney like it belongs to a neighbor, because in East Tennessee it usually does.

The Appalachian foothills are hard on masonry. Winters here swing from mild afternoons to hard overnight freezes, and water that soaks into a chimney crown by day expands into cracks by morning. Add humid summers, Smoky Mountain storms, and decades of wood smoke, and even a well-built chimney needs attention. Our technicians see spalled brick, failed flue tiles, and rusted dampers every week. We fix them properly, with materials suited to this climate, rather than patching what will only fail again next season.

Today the company operates staffed locations across East Tennessee, each open Monday through Saturday and each run by people who live in that community. Every technician is CSIA-trained and works from the same inspection checklist Wade wrote in his first year. We photograph what we find, explain it in plain language, and put the quote in writing before any repair is scheduled. Many of our customers have been with us for more than a decade, and a good share of new appointments come from their recommendations.

We take the craft side seriously. Chimney work in this region still means matching old brick on a farmhouse, tuckpointing a 1940s Fountain City bungalow, or restoring a stone fireplace in a Gatlinburg cabin so it draws the way it did when it was built. That work cannot be rushed, and we do not rush it. The name over the door says Pros, but the people behind the counter are sweeps and masons who learned the trade with their hands and are proud to keep an old tradition safe in modern homes.