Paris, Tennessee
Paris is a city in and the county seat of Henry County, Tennessee, United States.[6] As of the 2020 census, the city had a population of 10,316.[7]
For other uses, see Paris (disambiguation).A 70-foot (21 m) replica of the Eiffel Tower stands in the southern part of Paris.
History[edit]
The present site of Paris was selected by five commissioners appointed to the task of choosing a county seat at the December 1822 session of the Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions of Henry County. Their choice was a 50-acre (20 ha) site, of which 37.5 acres (15.2 ha) were owned by Joseph Blythe and 12.5 acres (5.1 ha) owned by Peter Ruff; both men donated the land to the county to have the seat there. A public square, streets, alleys, and 104 lots were laid off, and the lots were sold at auction over a two-day period in either March or April 1823.[8]
Paris was incorporated on September 30, 1823. It was the first town incorporated in West Tennessee, followed by Lexington on October 9, 1824, and Memphis on December 19, 1826.[8][9][10] The city was named after Paris, France, in honor of the Marquis de Lafayette, a hero of the American Revolutionary War.[1]
As the county seat, Paris was a center of trade for the rural county, which was largely devoted to agriculture and particularly the cultivation of cotton as a commodity crop. The planters depended on a large workforce of enslaved African Americans. In 1927, a man named Joseph Upchurch was lynched in Paris.[11][12]
Between about 1970 and 1990, Paris became the center of the Old Beachy Amish. Beachy Amish from different regions moved there to maintain their traditional ways. Because of internal conflicts, most Old Beachy Amish left the region in the early 1990s and had completely vacated it by 2000.[13]
Since the American Civil War, Paris has had an African American community of around 15%. Prior to the early 1960s, young black children attended segregated schools. But beginning in the 1960s, the town of Paris worked in conjunction with Henry County to consolidate all schools, busing all children from the periphery of the county to consolidated, integrated schools in Paris. The process was largely peaceful. Also beginning in the 1960s, there was a gradual process of integration of the races in business around the town, also largely peaceful.
Sports[edit]
From 1922 to 1924, Paris was home to a Minor League Baseball team that played in the Kentucky–Illinois–Tennessee League as the Paris Travelers (1922) and the Paris Parisians (1923–1924).[21] HCHS Football team has won the 5A State Championship twice.