Paris Mountain: Water, the New Deal, and the Corps

Paris Mountain rises about eleven hundred feet above the surrounding Piedmont just north of downtown Greenville, and the city's relationship with this particular hill is older than most people realize. Between eighteen ninety and nineteen oh five, the City of Greenville built four reservoir lakes on Paris Mountain's slopes to supply the growing city with drinking water. The mountain was not recreational; it was infrastructure.

The state park came later, out of economic desperation. In nineteen thirty-five, young men from the Civilian Conservation Corps arrived here as part of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal work-relief program. The Corps had been established in nineteen thirty-three to put unemployed men to work on conservation and public lands projects across the country. At Paris Mountain they built more than fifty structures, many of which remain standing and in use today. The park center, the picnic shelters, the bathhouse, the spillways, the bridges connecting trails across the property, all of it came from the hands of young men, most of them in their late teens and early twenties, who were paid thirty dollars a month, twenty-five of which was sent directly home to their families.

Paris Mountain State Park officially opened on June first, nineteen thirty-seven. It is listed in the National Register of Historic Places not only for its natural features but for its integrity as an example of Civilian Conservation Corps design philosophy. The buildings use local rubble stone and rough-hewn logs, constructed to fit into the landscape rather than impose on it.

The mountain itself was named, according to local tradition, for Richard Paris, an early settler, not for the French capital. The records on that are thin. The reservoir lakes are still here. The structures still stand. The Corps is still visible in every stone course.