paristexas12

This page is dedicated to a little place in Texas called Paris It is roughly 100 miles northeast of Dallas. I was fortunate enough to visit there last year and experience the place and the people. Paris would have to be one of the most beautiful little towns I have ever been in, the people are like you would find nowhere else in the world, they are so friendly and hospitable. It is the one place in the world I would love to call home because that is where I left my heart. There is an air of happiness and friendship in that small place as you would expect to find in most small towns. Paris is very special to me because of the wonderful people I met while I was there. I don't know if it is Texas across the board but I found the people in Paris especially friendly and very interested in what an Aussie had to talk about. We had fun times and good laughs at the difference in our accents and the way we say our words. Being an Aussie in America is an adventure in itself. :)............

These two people mean alot to me, Gloria is a very special friend. And that friendship means the world to me and more. I miss her more than she knows. One day I will be back to see you my friend- I Promise

This man is THE reason I travelled all the way to Texas. I met him online about 2 years ago and he and I became best of friends, I told him one day I would make my way to Texas to see him and I did just that, exactly one year to the day that we met online, we met face to face. It was an awesome experience and one I will never forget. We have had some happy and some sad times together, we have laughed and we have cried and through good times and bad we have always remained friends. I will love this man always.

Here we have Jerry, Mitzi (infront), Jericka and Chevis. These people are awesome they are the kindest people I have met in a long time they are like an extended family for my son Rhys and I am grateful to them all for welcoming us into their home and family with open arms.

This is a couple I met online as part of the clan I went to meet in Paris. Chris and Debbie are wonderful people they welcomed my son and myself into their home with their family and friends to share drinks, laughter and most of all friendship. Jason and Justin are their two sons and they are great kids. Chris is regional manager for Colortyme on Lamar Ave ,drop in and see him sometime for a good deal. :)

This family are the best, they welcome you in and treat you as one of their own.

Terry is one of the funniest guys I have ever met he has a wicked sense of humour and is always smiling no matter what is going on in his life. I am glad I had the chance to meet this man, there should be more like him in this world. Bk his wife is gorgeous, she is a very affectionate lady and very easy to open up to, she has a warm heart to those she loves and cares for.

Mae is a lady who has alot of family in Paris and surrounding areas and she is a very lucky lady to have the love from such wonderful people as her children and grandchildren. I for one took an instant liking to her as she reminds me so much of my late grandmother. Mae is so loving and warm to all she meets.

This is a picture of Debbie with her sister Mary and I all showing what we were drinking on a bus trip to see Ricky and the Red Streaks Concert, in Mt Pleasant TX. It was a great night, I just wish we had more country shows like that one here in the land down under-Australia.

This is Ross and I at his place in Paris where I spent most of my time and I have to say the lifestyle in Paris is very laid back and very comfortable, it is stress free and quiet. Exactly how I like it to be. Who knows one day down the road of life I might even be able to call Paris home!.

There are still so many other wonderful people I had met and have no photos of at this time but as soon as I have them scanned I will share these with you.

I just wanted to make this page and say a huge thank you to all of you who took my son and I in and treated us with love and care as if we were your own.

There are so many thriving businesses in Paris , mostly restaurants. I have never seen so many of them in the one place before in all my life, some of them are listed below..

Applebee's Neighborhood Grill & Bar
3905 Lamar Ave.
Paris, TX 75460
903-784-1005

Long John Silver's Seafood Shop
1870 Clarksville St.
Paris, TX 75460
903/784-5730

service, these boys are the BEST in the business and that's coming from an Aussie who knows.

MAJOR MANUFACTURERS
COMPANY NAME	EMPLOYMENT TOTAL	PRODUCT
Campbell Soup Company	1,200	Soups/Juice/Sauces
Kimberly-Clark Corporation	954	Disposable Diapers/Training and Swim Pants
The Earthgrains Co.	675	Snack Cakes/Breads
Christus St. Joseph's Hospital & Health Center	750	Medical Care
McCuistion Regional Medical Center	570	Medical Care
Paris Industries	230	Artificial Trees/Pools
Paris Packaging	164	Paper Cartons
Rodgers-Wade Manufacturing	150	Wood Cabinets
We Pack	191	Custom Packaging
Philips Lighting	110	Lamp Bases
David Buster, Inc.	100	Concrete
CSR Wall	89	Concrete Pipe
Harrison, Walker & Harper	99	Construction
Flex-O-Lite	74	Reflective Glass Beads
T & K Machinery	72	Aircraft Machined Parts
The Paris News	52	Newspaper
Valley Feed Mill	28	Mixed Fertilizer/Feed
Southwestern Foundry	24	Bronze Castings
Oliver Rubber Company	29	Tread Rubber/Repair Materials
Paris Custom Trailers	32	Utility Trailers
SESACO Corporation	32	Sesame Seeds

Few American cities have been able to preserve their built environment and at the same time expand as modern communities. Paris, Texas is among those fortunate few, not only surviving but preserving its civic character through fires, tornadoes, the Depression’s ‘30s and the urban movement of the ‘40s and ‘50s - any of which could have closed the books on its municipal vitality.

Paris is where it is today because of the Red River. Although boating the Red was uncertain and risky, it was done with regularity. Travis Wright, brother of George Wright, the founder of Paris, scheduled steamers to Wright’s Landing, in the front yard of his Kiomatia Plantation. Paris shipped and received goods in quantity via the river for forty years, and the Ames Tool Co., which made wooden handles, boxes and crates, kept a steam packet on the river until the 20^th century.

Paris was deliberately located on a divide between the Red and Sulphur rivers ridge reaching 620 feet - not spectacular, but fifty to 200 feet above the nearby land and high enough to catch breezes which discouraged mosquitoes. This is the land, some 894 square miles in area, that would soon become Lamar County. The land held permanent residents by 1837 when Claiborne Chisum bought a large tract which today lies in West Paris. George Wright, who had come to The Red River Valley in 1816 as a seven-year-old with his father, Claiborne, bought one thousand acres of the Larkin Rattan headright survey in 1839 and opened a store on that ridge.

Paris did not go through an uncertain period of frontier isolation. The county was part of Red River County until 1840 where Wright served as a representative to the First and Third Texas Congresses. His friends from Red River County in the Fifth Congress helped him get the new county created and named for Mirabeau B. Lamar, President of the Republic of Texas. By the time Paris was formally established and made county seat in 1844, adjoining territory was settling up and marauding Indians had been pushed westward. Paris was founded, and mostly settled by people familiar with the region. Unlike Dallas and Fort Worth, for instance, the men who conceived and planned the original town had lived in the vicinity for years. Early leaders such as the Wrights, the Chisums, and Epps Gibson, knew about the soils, the surroundings, even the weather. They knew what to expect, as well as what not to expect. Unlike most Texas towns, Paris looked north rather than south and west for expansion and trade. The Red River was the border between the Republic of Texas and the United States, and it also formed the boundary between the Anglo colony in Texas and the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations. From its outset Paris benefited from the commerce which flowed across the river and the services the Nations required. This huge market at its front door made the early progress of Paris easier. It didn’t have to struggle to survive. Within a decade of its founding Paris had outstripped the older, more firmly entrenched Clarksville, to the east; and for a ten-year period after 1889, Paris was also the legal headquarters with the U.S. District Court for the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations and westward in non-Indian Oklahoma. The U.S. courthouse in Paris was not only on of the most imposing structures in North Texas, it was among the busiest in the Southwest, handling all Indian trials and lawsuits which were not based on tribal law. Nine men were hanged in its courtyard during that decade.

Paris almost from its beginning was a separate sphere, unlike the surrounding region; more southern than western, and thanks to its merchants, more urban than rural, even though King Cotton ruled. Despite the original Texas home and burial place of John Chisum, one of the great ranching names of Texas history, Paris was never a cattle town. It was, after all, begun by a merchant and a politician, merchant Wright having been elected to the Texas Congress several times.

The city quickly experienced an influx of merchants from Doaksville and Fort Towson, across the river. This helped Paris not only to survive but - despite the importance of cotton - never to become dependent on any single crop, industry or commercial undertaking. What all this meant, prior to the Civil War, was that the town filled a commercial and industrial role unlike its agrarian neighbors. By 1860 a state business census showed that the Lamar County millers and furniture makers had made the county a "high wage" industrialized region (by the standards of that day) which meant it had lots of skilled craftsmen and trades people.

The flowering of Parisian culture began in the 1870s when all sorts of newspapers and journals were published espousing all kinds of interests and views. One of the more interesting of these was Common Sense, published by Richard Peterson, a theater owner and an avowed atheist. Convinced a doctor’s ice-pack treatment had killed his young son, Peterson had "Frozen to Death" chiseled on the boy’s gravestone in Evergreen Cemetery. The grave of Willet Babcock, also in Evergreen Cemetery, is nationally famous for its statue of "Jesus" in cowboy boots.

The most profound influence on Paris - the city that was and to a great extent the city that still exists - came from cotton. The importance of its role in making Paris Paris cannot be overemphasized. Cotton brought wealth to Paris. Cotton gave the small town a world outlook, and it created a class of citizens who, while not elitists in the current, political use of the word, were capable of making cultural and artistic decisions of community importance and backing them up, regardless of the size of community support.

Cotton, in its day, was as much a cultural dictator as it was economic, and Paris became a gilded branch of the Cotton Kingdom: elite, well-positioned, and guided by its ideas and cultural institutions more often than its agricultural situation. The cotton buyers and the cotton factors, who represented various out-of-town buyers, told the farmers what they would do, not vice versa. The surviving homes of that period evidence a concern with show and beauty before usefulness or function. There is an architecturally expressed desire to display and mark achievement.

1908 marked the appearance of J.L.Wees, a European trained architect, who was brought to Paris to design and elaborate home for investor Rufus Scott. Wees later moved to Paris and almost single-handedly established the standard for its architecture and public spaces after the disastrous 1916 fire.

The square, or plaza as it came to be known, has always been the historic heart of Paris. In cotton days it was jammed with wagons and bales, and formed an open air curb market before the Paris Cotton Exchange was put in operation. There are reported to be cisterns containing water, measuring some 15’ in diameter, at the corners of the square, put there for fire protection in the days when the square was choked with cotton and cotton wagons. The terrible 1916 fire (by far worst of three major conflagrations in the city’s history) started at the southwestern edge of Paris, and swept around the square to do its costliest damage before blowing east out Pine Bluff Road to wipe out an assembly of finer homes. It cost the city 270 acres and $15 million in property damage, a number of important architectural landmarks, including the major office buildings, two banks and the county courthouse. But the 1916 fire performed a bitter service: it modernized Paris and made it possible today for one to observe the place almost intact from the post-flames resurrection.

With agriculture leading the way, the city and county prospered through the 1920s, and survived the 1930s. World War II shrank the county’s population in the 1940s as many went to war, and a lot of those that returned settled near the larger Texas cities.

The 1950s saw the industrialization of Texas jump into high gear, and many more Lamar Countians staked their claim in Dallas, Houston and all other cities that had industry jobs aplenty. However, industry was also beginning to look at Paris. Westinghouse opened a plant in 1951. One year later, Babcock & Wilcox started up their facility. 1954 found the establishment of Hollywood-Vassarette, as well as UARCO who began printing two years later.

The 1960s found things booming. 1962 found Superior Switchboard entering the production lines as well as Campbell Soup, the country’s largest employer, beginning operation in 1964.

The 1970s noted the establishment of Southwestern Foundry, a subsidiary of Stockham Valves & Fittings; and two operating divisions of Merico Inc., a subsidiary of the baking conglomerate, Campbell Taggart and now Anheuser-Busch.

In the 1980s Kimberly-Clark chose Paris for a new plant site, along with Paris industries, a division of General Foam Plastics Corporation. In 1988, Kimberly-Clark chose Paris for a 300,000 square foot expansion, in 1992 added an additional 60,000 square feet, and in 1988 TENASKA chose Paris for a co-generating power plant. During 1989, Campbell Soup added a 75,000 square foot distribution center and constructed a 225,000 square foot manufacturing expansion to their facility which was completed and on line in February 1991. During 1992-1993, Rogers-Wade, a commercial display cabinet company, expanded over 60,000 square feet during 1993.

Paris is a city that has not had to make comparisons with itself. It never tried to be another Dallas, or St. Louis, its cultural mecca of other days. It hasn’t tried to imitate other places. Because of its location, it was, and remains, a self-contained city, with its own markets and patterns of economic growth. Paris, today, is generally recognized around the Southwest as being a unique city, a city with its own personality. Not like other cities and not always wanting to be like another city.

MAJOR MANUFACTURERS