Paris, Tennessee

This article is about Paris, Tennessee. For other uses of the term Paris, please see Paris (disambiguation).

Authors [about]: Pat Palmer and others. CZ is an open collaboration. Please join in to develop this article!

Paris, Tennessee (USA) is a small town of about 10,000 people in West Tennessee. It was founded and incorporated in 1823. Paris is in the geographic center of Henry County (which has 32,363 residents in 2021, including Paris). The county is in the upper right corner of West Tennessee bordered by Kentucky (north) and the Tennessee River (east), and Paris, being in the center, is the county's legal and administrative seat. As is common in this region, the heart of the town and country is a "court square", a special city block on which stands an imposing court house. The current Henry County court house building dates from 1897.

Standing on the courthouse lawn is a statue of an anonymous confederate soldier, and that monument is one of many monuments around the U.S. which have been earmarked by the InvisibleHate.org website in 2020 as deserving retirement (possibly to another location such as a private cemetery containing the remains of confederate soldiers).

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An 1839 slave sale

The following rates were paid for slaves in Henry County during a sale in February 1839:

• man: $900 to $1000
• woman: $700 to $900
• child: $600 to $800

In terms of 2021 monetary worth, the cost per slave would be like

• man: $25,209 to $28,010
• woman: $19,607 to $25,209
• child: $16,806 to $22,408

Slavery at the time of the civil war

In the decade leading up to the civil war, most of the economy of Henry County came from moderate-sized farms between 20 and 500 acres; their owners and families were the main demographic of the county at that time.. Three other groups existed in small pockets only: large plantation owners, poor whites, and free negroes. Per the county census figures, a third of all heads of these farm families owned slaves in 1950. Tobacco and cotton were important crops, and the labor for those crops was done almost exclusively by slaves, who constituted a quarter of the overall population, but lived on only a third of the farms. The county's slaveholders had great influence with politics of the day. Two-thirds of Henry County voters elected to secede from the union, and any Union sentiment in the remaining third of the population was brutally suppressed, not only in Henry County but in most of West and Middle Tennessee. During this period, Isham G. Harris and John D. C. Atkins, both strongly pro-southern in sentiment, were very popular and acted as the main political voices in Henry County.

Image gallery

These will be placed later

Henry County, TN, court house, Nov. 24, 2005	Confederate monument, dating from 1900, standing on the courthouse lawn in Paris, TN, as described by the Henry County Historical Society on it's Facebook page in 2020.