Paris, Tennessee

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Henry County, TN, court house, Nov. 24, 2005

Paris, Tennessee (USA) is a small town in West Tennessee that was incorporated in 1823. In recent decades, its population has hovered at around 10,000 people. It is the county seat for Henry County and its town center, like many towns in the region, is built around an imposing court house which is now more than a hundred years old. People have to go there to get licensed to be married, to look at property records, or to have trials. Except for these occasions, people in Paris, TN, go to Walmart or The Home Depot just like everyone else in the USA.

Paris is in the geographic center of Henry County, which is in the upper right corner of West Tennessee, bordered by Kentucky to the north and the Tennessee River to the east. The town is indisputably "out in the boonies"; even with modern freeways, it requires a good two hours by car, driving at slightly illegal speeds, to reach any really large city (Memphis, Nashville or Paducah, KY).

It goes without saying that the town was named after its famous counterpart in France. Towns in other states chose the name as well--in Kentucky, Arkansas and Texas, for example--and arguably, if someone were abducted, blindfolded, and then plopped down randomly on the court square of any of these towns today, they would be hard pressed to know which state they were in without being told.

The Chickasaw People (before 1820)

The decades leading up to the establishment of Paris as an incorporated town within the state of Tennessee were unfortunate for the indigenous people, the Chickasaw, who had long established and held West Tennessee (as well as more territory south of the state) as their own home and hunting ground. The location of Paris lies at the very northeast tip of the area long claimed and controlled by the Chickasaw, but it was of critical importance due to the presence of a rare and precious salt lick. Using modern names, the salt lick lay near Sulphur Wells in the nearby community of Springville. Long before Paris was built, other native groups besides the Chickasaw made occasional pilgrimages to the area to visit the salt lick. You can still find yourself driving on a street named Chickasaw in Paris, TN, but aside from this vestige of their former presence, the early European settlers invaded their homeland, and within a few dacades of Paris being built, the Chickasaw were forcibly removed from the region. The founders of Paris thus arrived, in effect, as conquerers do, possessed the country as their own by right of might, but wrote history (as victors tend to do) as having taken the land by right of discovery. Of course, this didn't take place just in Paris, TN, or in the wider region of West Tennessee, but at idffering time, on every inch of what is now the continental United States.

Paris builds its first school (1820s)

The town of Paris, TN, was first incorporated in 1823, when enough European settlers had made their way westward across the Tennessee river to need a court house. Two years later, funded by 60 men, a private school called the "Paris Male Academy" opened.

Indigenous people evicted (1830s)

In the late 1830's, during an era when a Tennessean (the now-notorious Andrew Jackson) was President of the United States, a shameful series of historical events, later dubbed the "The Trail of Tears" by members of the Cherokee tribe, took place with aid from troops of the federal government. Over 16,000 native Americans were forcibly removed from all parts of Tennessee and were forced to march, on foot and in cold weather, westwards to what was then called "Indian Territory" (later the state of Oklahoma). About one in four of the Native Americans so removed died along the march route. The first uprooting started with the Cherokee of East Tennessee, and the last began in West Tennessee with the Chickasaw people. We don't know specifically how this played out in the vicinity of Paris, TN, but due to its proximity to the critical salt licks frequented by many tribes, there must have been considerable impact.

Cotton and slavery to the fore (1850s)

There must have been slaves in the 1850s in the vicinity of Paris, TN, though local history, from the perspective of white free people, has said little of them. Most of the population were themselves too poor to own slaves, but we know that by the 1960s, about 15% of the overall population was African American.

Invasion, occupation, resistance (1860s)

During the Civil War, the school, originally founded as "Paris Men's Academy", was the site where Confederate troops mustered for service. After that, the school closed for the duration of the war. Twenty miles due east of Paris, TN, across and just down (north) on the river, Fort Henry guarded the Tennessee river against incursions by Union troops. It was there, on February 6, 1862, that Grant fought his first, major successful battle. Along with the battle of nearby Fort Donelson, this battle opened West Tennessee, including Paris, to Union invasion and occupation for the duration of the war.

Nostalgia and sentimentality (1910s)

In 1910, the public school in Paris, TN, (on the very same site as the original "Paris Men's Academy") was renamed as the Robert E. Lee school, a name which would persist, at least informally, for more than a century. The renaming was a sign of the regional fervor in which many towns and cities around the South erected statues, and renamed parks and schools for so-called "Civil War heroes", all of whom happened to be on the confederate (rebel, losing) side of the war.

The rest of that decade was about the same in Paris, TN, as elsewhere in the USA. Young men shipped off to Europe to fight in WWI; some never returned, and those who did, were often unhappy for life. The 1918 flu pandemic killed many people locally, especially the young and seemingly healthy. And women gained the right to vote, even in places as far flung as Paris, TN, after a world-wide struggle lasting over half a century.

Bridging the Tennessee river (1920s)

Records show that the Tennessee river was first bridged in 1927 with the construction of the Scott Fitzhugh bridge across the Tennessee river, at a landing place for barges on the river, 20 miles due east of Paris, TN, that was called (no surprise) Paris Landing. The bridge linked Henry County, via its then miserable secondary roads, to Stewart County in Middle Tennessee. Stewart County, like its counterparts on the west side of the river, was known as a hotbed for bootlegging and other illicit activity, where people lived lawlessly in rugged foothills that were largely inaccessible except on horseback, so the main reason for anyone to use the bridge at that time was to stock up on illegal booze, or if they happened to have relatives living in those hills. You could eventually get to Nashville, TN via those hills if you had been born in the area and thus knew all the twisty ways through the forests.

Hunger, homelessness, and TVA (1930s)

When the national economy crashed, no one had any money, and there was little food for several years. People living on farms around Paris, TN, either stored enough food from their own efforts, or went hungry. In years when vermin got into the potato stores, people were subsisting on canned sauerkraut in the last days of winter. Homeless hobos jumped the trains and moved around looking for food.

As part of the New Deal federal program to put starving people to work, as well as a national effort to control flooding on the Mississippi river by controlling the flow of its major tributaries (and their tributaries), an organization called Tennessee Valley Association (TVA) was formed to build dams on the Tennessee river. Construction on the Kentucky Dam began in 1938, but long before that, the preparations began on which families had to leave land that would soon be flooded. It was this effort that flooded the important salt lick near Sulphur Wells and Springville, and in addition, residents were forcibly relocated from a large swathe of land near Paris, TN, called the "Old 23rd district", before the dam could be built. Not all of the vacated land was flooded, either; quite a bit of it was set aside as a federal wildlife reserve. The impact on families in the vicinity of Paris, TN was considerable. It was believed that the wildlife refuge was established in order to clear up an area long famous for bootlegging and violent murders and beyond the reach of law enforcement.

The Scott Fitzhugh bridge across the Tennessee river, 20 miles due east of Paris, had to be raised 46' feet at this time to accommodate the rising waters created by Kentucky Dam.

The Big Sandy river, a tributary of the Tennessee river close to Paris, TN, formerly long and winding, was rerouted to become a straight cut ditch.

People who survived the 1930s learned to be frugal and made it a habit never to throw anything away, and in later decades, they left enormous piles of stuff to their descendants when they passed away. This phenomenon was, of course, not confined to Paris, TN, but we know for sure that residents of Paris, TN, did a very good job of playing their part.

World War II (1940s)

Kentucky dam was finished, and where the Tennessee river and its many tributaries once flowed, there now was Kentucky lake. Men were drafted and sent off to fight in World War II. For the war effort, women were suddenly allowed to work in factories, and other jobs formerly only employing men. When men returned from the war, some women kept working those jobs. Only some of the men came back from the war, and they were found to have been indelibly changed by the war. In later decades, these veterans of WWII would meet on the public benches around the court square, chew tobacco, and spit tobacco juice on the ground, while talking with each other.

Clay and cotton fade; factories arrive (1950s)

Factories, in search of low cost labor, relocated from "up North" to Paris beginning in the 1950s. They made automobile parts, office furniture and lamps. They did not hire African Americans back then, and if any Mexicans were hired, they did not thrive due to covert hostility from other workers.

Unlike a modern day Amazon warehouse, the factories were not controlled by robots or computers, which did not exist yet; they were controlled, instead, by people. The inspectors in factories had a certain power over individual workers and were sometimes neither nice nor honest. People put up with it for the pay, which was pretty good, unless there was a layoff or a strike.

Most families owned automobiles by then. People built garages to house the automobiles, filled the garages with stuff, and than parked the cars on the lawn. It became not unusual to see an old, rusty car propped on concrete blocks with its wheels removed.

About this time, a red clay pit (mine) was dug along a road named Mineral Wells Avenue. A conveyor belt moved the clay over the street to a pottery, which used it to create terra cotta pots, bird baths, and such. The mine and pottery lasted until sometime in the 1960s.

A cotton gin stoof near the pottery. Because piled up cotton boles generate heat unless stirred frequently, the cotton gin would occasionally catch on fire, and it burned to the ground every few years. It appears to have been there for a long time, but it finally closed down in the 1960's.

Preparing for the racial integration of schools (1960s)

Until 1970 or so, several smaller communities nearby had their own schools, including Henry, Cottage Grove, and Springville. Some of the outlying schools were very small if not quite one-room school houses. Paris itself had multiple elementary, junior high, and high schools. The population of the area in the 1960's was about 15% African American, and schools in Paris were segregated. Like most--if not all--communities in the South, neighborhoods were also segregated, with African Americans predominantly relegated to live in one small portion of the town. And that was, of course, a rather low income district because of the limited kinds of work that, in those days, African Americans would be allowed to do (such as, picking cotton all day in the hot, boiling sun, for 5 cents a bag). Around 1963, facing the Supreme Court mandate to end racial school segregation, the Henry County school system began a gradual introduction of African American students into formerly all-white elementary schools in Paris, paralleling similar actions taken all over the South. The first year, about 1964, three or four brave children of color were admitted to the formerly all-white schools, with the number slowly growing each year before the planned complete integration to occur at the end of the decade.

By the 1960s, the African American population in Paris, TN, lived virtually confined within "their" section of town, segregated and ghettoized and still unable to use the same public spaces or work the same jobs as white people. They were subject to being treated as less than human by many people. Picking cotton by hand was still, a century after slavery ended, about the only work a black man or child could get in Paris, TN. A black woman could do cooking or child care or house cleaning, too, if she would quiet be enough and "kept her place" as the old people would say. People of color were still discouraged from going into restaurants or buildings, except through back doors, and forced to use separate bathrooms (if there were any). After the integration of the schools, these restrictions and attitudes began to thaw quickly among the majority of whites, but the old hatreds and prejudices have remained simmering beneath the surface for all this time.

Busing as equal opportunity inconvenience (1970s)

In the late 60's, Henry County Schools began construction of a then-very-large high school in the town which would become the only high school in the county and, being located in the county center, would serve all students regardless of race. This "consolidated" Henry County High School opened in 1970 with an innovative, round-building design. Three round buildings were built, with classrooms around the outsides and common areas (auditorium, library, cafeteria) in the middle, and some people compared the buildings to flying saucers. Smaller high schools in outlying communities had to close and bus their students to the consolidated school. The outlying elementary schools closed in favor of larger elementary and junior high schools in Paris. By these actions, the Henry County School system finally became racially integrated, with less overt conflict than some surrounding areas in the region due to its policy of equal opportunity inconvenience.

Factories leave; logging arrives (1980s)

We're looking for someone to set us straight about this. For one thing, the bigger factories started to leave the area around this time. The buildings of those big factories are now, in many cases, moldering wrecks. In desperation for lost livelihoods, some local people turned to logging, and some of the lush forests were clear-cut and housing developments appeared instead. This phenomenon was widespread and not confined just to Paris, TN, but it definitely occurred there. People also discovered that the government would pay farmers to "harvest" trees from their land at an allegedly sustainable rate which fell short of actual clear-cutting. In our experience, people in Paris, TN, had no opinion on whether the government should develop lasers in space that could shoot people on earth (Ronald Reagan's so-called "Star Wars" project), on grounds that Paris, TN, was too small to be a target anyway.

The tallest Eiffel Tower (1990s)

Eiffel Tower replica in Paris, TX; made taller by the addition of a red hat to beat the height of Paris, TN's replica tower

In 1993, the old Scott Fitzhugh bridge at Paris Landing was replaced by the new Ned McWherter bridge, making it just as easy as before to travel into Stewart County to get hooch. Also in 1993, both Paris, TN and Paris, TX decided to build Eiffel Towers, each 60 feet high. But when the towers were deployed, the people of Paris, TN, had sneaked an extra 10 feet onto their tower, making it the tallest Eiffel tower in the USA. The people of Paris, TX, feeling perhaps uncharacteristically belittled, found it necessary to escalate the towers arms race by adding a highly provocative red Stetson hat to their tower. That decision turned out to be controversial, as some people in the state of Texas described it as the stupidest decision ever made, even for the state of Texas.

Millenials are born (2000s)

Arguably, the birth of hundreds of Millenials marked the long, slow evolution towards a revolution that we are living in today. The Millenials born in Paris, TN, bore an extra burden, though, because forever afterwards, they had to explain to people that they were from Paris, not France, but Tennessee.

(2010s)

We're currently too close to this era to understand what has happened, but if someone figures it out, please write about it here.

Historic school loses its provocative name (2020)

On the outskirts of Paris, TN stands an old school building, the site of the original "Paris Mens Academy" founded in 1825. It had been abandoned in the 1970's due to consolidation. Then in 1988, the Lee school building in Paris, TN, dating from the 1890's, was added to the National Trust Register of Historic Places. In the early 2000's, a non-profit was formed to renovate and convert the building for use as "Lee Academy for the Arts", a charter school focused on the visual and performing arts. . At the start of the 2020-21 school year, with race relations again in the limelight, the school's non-profit board renamed the charter school to the Paris Academy for the Arts.

Renamed in 2020 to Paris Academy for the Arts, this now-private school was, when this postcard was issued circa 1900, a public school. It was not renamed for the Civil War confederate general Robert E. Lee until 1910.