Sam Bell Maxey House

On East Church Street in Paris, Texas, stands the house that Major General Sam Bell Maxey built in eighteen sixty-seven and eighteen sixty-eight, soon after the Confederacy collapsed and he came home to start over. Maxey was a West Point graduate, class of eighteen forty-six, a veteran of the Mexican War, and one of the highest-ranking Confederate officers in the Indian Territory during the Civil War. He commanded Cherokee, Creek, and Choctaw troops on the western frontier of the Confederacy, an unusual command for a Confederate general.

After the war he rebuilt his law practice in Paris and eventually won election to the United States Senate, where he served two terms. The house he built here, a Victorian Italianate with Greek Revival traces, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-one. The Texas Historical Commission now operates it as a state historic site, preserving rooms the Maxey family lived in for nearly a century.