Paris, Texas: The Town That Named Itself Hopefully

In eighteen forty-four, a merchant named George Wright donated fifty acres just below the Red River in northeast Texas for a townsite he decided would be called Paris. No one seems to have asked why. The name was aspirational, a bit absurd, and completely Texan , a blank-slate confidence that this dusty crossroads in the Republic of Texas would one day be worth a grand European comparison.

Paris grew into the Lamar County seat and by the late nineteenth century had become a genuine regional capital, a rail hub connecting farmers across the Red River Valley to markets in Dallas and beyond. Two railroads crossed here. Cotton warehouses lined the downtown blocks. The population pushed toward ten thousand and the county courthouse was one of the grandest buildings in northeast Texas.

Then came the fires. A catastrophic blaze in eighteen seventy-seven destroyed much of downtown. The city rebuilt. Another fire in nineteen sixteen consumed almost the entire commercial district and a large swath of residential neighborhoods , a disaster of such scale that Paris remade itself almost from scratch over the following three years. The rebuilt downtown became a kind of time capsule of nineteen-teens commercial architecture, brick and stone facades in the Beaux-Arts and commercial vernacular styles that still define the streetscape today.

The city's most famous monument arrived much later: a sixty-five-foot steel replica of the Eiffel Tower, erected in nineteen ninety-three after an amateur civic campaign, topped with a red cowboy hat in nineteen ninety-eight to settle, once and for all, which Paris this actually was.

But the more serious claim to fame arrived in nineteen eighty-four, when German director Wim Wenders used the name, the mythology, and the landscape of the American Southwest to make one of the defining road pictures of the twentieth century. In the film, a man named Travis wanders out of the desert trying to find a place called Paris, Texas , a place his parents had once loved. The film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. The real Paris, population twenty-four thousand, acquired an unlikely layer of cinematic legend.