Paris, Tennessee: Difference between revisions
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== The pre-civil-war economy == | == The pre-civil-war economy == | ||
== Slavery at the time of the civil war == | == Slavery at the time of the civil war == | ||
Revision as of 11:55, 5 February 2021
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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[1]). 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[2].
Standing on the courthouse lawn is a statue of an anonymous confederate soldier[3], 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).
This is a placeholder reference[4]
The indigenous people here before European settlers
How the early European settlers obtained deeds to the land
The pre-civil-war schools
The pre-civil-war economy
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.[5]. 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[6]. 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[7], 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[8].
Image gallery
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References
- ↑ Henry County, Tennessee Population 2021 on World Population Review, last access 1/27/2021
- ↑ Per the National Geographic Tennessee River Valley website (last access on 11/30/2020), the 1897 Richardsonian Romanesque courthouse in Paris is the oldest working judicial building in West Tennessee.
- ↑ Waymarking: Henry Co. Confederate Monument, Paris, TN, last access 1/17/2021
- ↑ Antebellum Henry County by Roger Raymond Van Dyke, West Tennessee Historical Society, Papers 1947-2015, Vol 33, 49pp; see page (tbd)
- ↑ WTHS, Van Dyke p 72
- ↑ WTHS, Van Dyke pp69-71
- ↑ WTHS Van Dyke, p 73 and p 78
- ↑ WTHS Van Dyke, p 74