This Small Texas Town Has Its Own Eiffel Tower, and It Wears a Cowboy Hat

The first time I drove into town, I nearly steered onto the shoulder. There, rising over a parking lot in the far northeast corner of Texas, stood the Eiffel Tower.

Not a postcard of it. Not a mural on a brick wall. The actual iron silhouette, needling straight up into a wide Texas sky.

I parked, climbed out, and tipped my head back to take it in. That is when I noticed the hat.

A giant red cowboy hat, cocked back at a rakish angle, sitting right on the pointed top. The whole tower looked like it had wandered in off a rodeo grounds and forgotten to check its brim at the gate.

Welcome to Paris. Not that one across the ocean, the one in Lamar County. This is a place with a little small-town swagger, the kind that turns a French monument into a joke the whole town is in on.

Below, I will walk you through all of it: the tower, the marble fountain that rose from the ashes, a statue of Jesus in cowboy boots, and a senator’s mansion full of original antiques. Pack a day for it. Paris fills one beautifully.

A Tower With a Ten-Gallon Attitude

Let me start with the obvious. Yes, the tower is real, and yes, the hat is the point.

The local chapter of the Boilermakers union, Local 902, built it back in 1993. The materials and labor were donated by the Babcock and Wilcox company, with engineering help from a man named David Dickey.

It stands roughly one-sixteenth the height of the original in France. That is exactly the kind of cheerfully unbothered math that makes Texas feel like Texas.

Here is the part I love. That same year, the folks over in Paris, Tennessee, put up their own Eiffel Tower, a full 60 feet tall. A rivalry was born, and Paris, Texas needed an edge.

So in 1998, the town’s boosters voted to give theirs some genuine character. Up went the hat: a huge metal cowboy hat, tipped back just so, its ten-foot brim shoving the whole thing to 65 feet and back into first place.

Tennessee has since stretched theirs taller. It does not matter one bit. Only one of these towers wears boots-and-Stetson energy, and you are standing under it.

Come back after dark and the tower glows. LED lights wash the ironwork in colors that shift with the season, so a winter visit and a summer visit never quite look the same. It is worth planning your day around one look in daylight and one after sunset.

Did you know? The 1993 original was completely hatless. The cowboy-hat identity, the thing that put this tower on every Texas bucket list, did not arrive until five years later. Sometimes the best ideas show up fashionably late.

There is a sweetness under the joke, too. The town really is named Paris, and building a scale-model Eiffel Tower is its way of winking at that French namesake. The hat just makes sure nobody forgets which Paris they are standing in.

The base of the tower is a small park in its own right, with benches and a wide-open lawn. Bring a picnic, let the kids run, and get your photo from far enough back to fit the whole hat in the frame.

The Fountain That Rose From the Ashes

To understand downtown, you have to go back to a very bad morning. On March 21, 1916, a fire tore through Paris and swept across 264 acres.

It took roughly 1,400 buildings with it, including the courthouse, the post office, and nearly the entire business district. In a matter of hours, half the town was gone.

What happened next is the part locals still tell with pride. The town did not shrink or scatter. It rebuilt, and it did it fast, raising a brand-new downtown in about eighteen months.

That is why the buildings you wander past today share a look. They went up together in the late 1910s, a run of Victorian, Italianate, and Art Deco storefronts that give the square its handsome, all-of-a-piece character.

At the very center sits the reward for all that rebuilding: the Culbertson Fountain. A local businessman and philanthropist named J. J. Culbertson commissioned it to crown the recovery, and it was built between 1924 and 1927.

The fountain is two tiers of white Italian Carrara marble, set in an octagonal basin, modeled after the grand fountains of Europe. It cost $50,000 at the time, a small fortune, and it has anchored the middle of the square ever since.

Antiques, Boutiques, and a Slow Afternoon

The plaza around the fountain is made for wandering, which is my favorite way to spend an afternoon in a new town. No agenda, just doorways.

Downtown Paris is thick with antique shops, boutiques, and art galleries tucked into those century-old storefronts. There is a historic theater on the square, too, one that still puts on live performances.

My advice is to leave the plan at home. Get a coffee, walk a loop of the square, and let the marble fountain be your landmark.

Duck into whichever shop has the most interesting window. This is a town that rewards curiosity over checklists, and half the fun is the thing you were not looking for in the first place. I walked out with a chipped enamel pitcher I absolutely did not need.

What surprised me most was how easy the pace felt. Nobody rushes you here. Shopkeepers talk, and if you ask about the fire or the fountain, most of them have a story their grandparents handed down.

Jesus in Cowboy Boots

Now for the town’s strangest, most wonderful surprise, and one of the best free hours in East Texas.

Out at Evergreen Cemetery, established in 1866 and named a Texas Historical Cemetery in 2012, there are some 40,000 grave markers. One of them stops every visitor cold.

It is a 15-foot memorial topped by a robed figure with a cross and carved wreaths. And the figure is wearing, plain as day, a pair of cowboy boots.

The grave belongs to Willet Babcock, and his story is as good as his headstone. He came down from Ithaca, New York, fought for the Union as a lieutenant in the Civil War, then settled in Paris and built a thriving furniture and casket company.

His store did double duty as the town’s opera house, complete with a 1,200-seat theater. Picture that: buy a rocking chair on the ground floor, catch a show upstairs.

Before he died in 1881, Babcock commissioned a German immigrant stonecutter named Gustave Klein to carve his memorial. Klein gave the robed figure that one unmistakable Texas twist.

Is it Jesus? Locals have argued about it for generations. Some say the face looks too soft and beardless to be Christ, and that the figure is leaning on the cross rather than carrying it, so perhaps it is an angel.

Nobody has ever settled it, and honestly, the mystery is half the charm. The local paper once described Evergreen as a cemetery, a historical museum, and an outdoor art gallery all at once. Spend twenty minutes among the carved markers and you will see exactly what they meant.

A Senator’s House on Church Street

For a look at how Paris lived in its silk-and-lace years, point yourself toward the Sam Bell Maxey House on Church Street.

Sam Bell Maxey was a Mexican War veteran, a Confederate general, and a two-term United States senator. His family moved into this fashionable new home in 1868, when Paris was booming as a cotton and railroad town.

It is a fine example of High Victorian Italianate style, all tall windows, deep porches, and confident lines. The same two families, the Maxeys and the Longs, lived here for nearly a century before it became a state historic site.

What makes the tour special is that so much of what you see is original to the house. These are antiques the family actually lived with, kept in place across generations, not props brought in later.

The Texas Historical Commission runs it now, and the guides are the kind who send you off knowing three stories you did not walk in with. I still think about the one they told me on the staircase.

Give yourself a moment on the grounds afterward. The gardens are quiet and shaded, and the whole block feels like a soft step back into the town’s cotton-money days, when a senator’s porch was where the news of Paris got made.

Pro tip: tours start at the top of the hour, and the last one begins at 3 p.m., so give yourself time. Admission runs about $4 for adults, which may be the best deal in Lamar County.

Rolling Out on the Trail de Paris

When you are ready to trade sidewalks for shade, the Trail de Paris is waiting. It is the local stretch of the Northeast Texas Trail, a rail-to-trail path that runs some 35 miles all the way to Farmersville.

You do not even need to bring your own wheels. There are bikes to rent right near the Eiffel Tower, so the whole thing takes about as much planning as deciding to go.

Roll straight from the cowboy-hatted landmark onto a green ribbon of a path that winds through trees and over old bridges. It is the perfect way to shake off a big lunch.

Better still, it shows you a softer, leafier side of a town most people only ever photograph from a parking lot. Go a mile out and the traffic noise fades to birdsong and gravel under your tires.

How to Get There

Paris sits in the northeast corner of Texas, an easy day trip up from the Dallas-Fort Worth area and a natural anchor for a Red River road trip. Here is where to point your GPS.

Where: Eiffel Tower, 2025 S Collegiate Dr, Paris, TX 75460

Where: Sam Bell Maxey House, 812 S Church St, Paris, TX 75460

Where: Evergreen Cemetery, 560 Evergreen St, Paris, TX 75460

The Culbertson Fountain sits at the heart of the downtown plaza, right in the middle of the historic square, so you will spot it the moment you reach downtown.

Start Planning Your Trip to the Other Paris

Some towns hand you their whole personality in a single glance, and this is one of them. A French tower in a cowboy hat tells you everything about the kind of place that built it: proud, funny, and completely unbothered by what anyone else thinks.

So gas up the car, point it northeast, and go see the Eiffel Tower that wears boots. Just try not to fall in love with the marble fountain before you have even made it to the far side of the square.