The History of Paris, Texas

Settlers began arriving in the area by the 1820s, drawn to the fertile blackland and river-bottom soil of the Red River Valley. The town was officially named Paris in 1844 — after the French capital — and incorporated in 1845 as the seat of Lamar County. The choice of name reflected the era's fashion for European city names on the American frontier, and it gave the town an identity it would later lean into hard.

The surrounding country was rich farmland, and cotton quickly became king. Paris developed as a trading and shipping point for the cotton economy, with a courthouse square at its heart and a growing population of merchants, farmers, and freighters.

The arrival of the railroads transformed Paris into a regional powerhouse. From 1876 through the mid-20th century, the city was a major rail hub, served at its peak by the Texas and Pacific, Santa Fe, Frisco, and Southern Pacific lines. The railroads connected Paris's cotton and farm goods to national markets and made the city the commercial center of Northeast Texas.

Prosperity built a substantial downtown of brick commercial buildings, banks, and grand homes — including the Sam Bell Maxey House, home of a Confederate general who became one of the first U.S. Senators from Texas after Reconstruction. Cotton wealth and rail traffic made late-19th-century Paris one of the more important inland cities in the state.

Paris has been shaped by fire. The city suffered major blazes in 1877 and 1896, but the defining disaster was the Great Fire of March 1916, which destroyed almost half the town — burning the courthouse, the post office, and the entire business district, with damages estimated at $11 million. It was one of the most destructive city fires in Texas history.

Rather than fade, Paris rebuilt. The downtown that rose from the 1916 fire — much of it still standing today around the Culbertson Fountain plaza — gave the city its enduring architectural character. The willingness to rebuild after catastrophe became part of the local identity.

An honest history of Paris also acknowledges a dark chapter. The town was the site of some of the most infamous racial-terror lynchings in American history, including the 1893 public torture and killing of Henry Smith before thousands of spectators — an atrocity that helped galvanize the early anti-lynching movement — and the murder of two members of the Arthur family in 1920. These events are a painful and important part of the historical record, remembered today as part of a fuller reckoning with the era.

Modern Paris is a city of about 24,000 and the commercial center for a wide rural region of Northeast Texas and Southeast Oklahoma. Its economy has diversified well beyond cotton, anchored by healthcare (Paris Regional Medical Center) and manufacturing (Campbell Soup, Kimberly-Clark). In 1993 the city embraced its name with a 65-foot replica of the Eiffel Tower, and in 1998 it crowned the tower with a giant red cowboy hat — a perfectly Texan answer to a rival tower in Paris, Tennessee. It's a town that knows how to have fun with its identity while carrying real history beneath it.