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Comprehensive Plan, City of Paris, Texas Planning Process never a cattle town. It was, after all, begun by a merchant and a politician, merchant `Vright having been elected to the Texas Congress several times. The town filled a commercial and industrial role unlike its agrarian neighbors. By 1860 a state business census showed that the Lamar County millers, turning out brand name flour and meal, and the Paris furniture makers, had made the county a"high wage" industrialized region (by the standards of that day) which meant it had lots of skilled craftsmen and trades people. But the most profound influence on Paris the City that was and to a great extent the City that still exists - came from cotton. The importance of cotton in establishing the City of Paris cannot be overemphasized. Cotton brought wealth to Paris. Cotton gave the small town a world outlook, and it created a class of citizens who, while not elitists in the current, political use of the word, were capable of making cultural and artistic decisions of community importance and backing them up, regardless of the size of community support. Their descendents still remain, and in some cases, continue to play valuable social roles with independent views and life-styles. Cotton, in this day, was as much a cultural dictator as it was economic, and Paris became a gilded branch of the Cotton Kingdom: elite, well positioned, and guided by its ideas and cultural institutions more often than its agricultural situation. The surviving homes of that period evidence a concern with show and beauty before usefulness or function. There is an architecturally expressed desire to display and mark achievement. There is also a calm quality of knowing what Paris society needed, which is expressed so strongly that even now we feel almost intimidated by the obvious satisfaction Parisians gave wordless voice to in their buildings, the design of their streets, and the quality of their stores. Why is it, today, years after its time as such a center, Paris still carries benefits and traces from the great cotton years which ended with U.S. government support payments and marketing rules in the 1930's? The most reasonable answer is that Paris did not hit oil and thereby make the drastic swerve in civic life that took place in towns like Kilgore, Tyler and Longview which lost their past when they gained oil. There was no sudden substitution of one basic income with its way of life for another. Paris retained its cotton kingdom mentality (if a community may be spoken of that way) even as it sought, and found, new sources of economic growth. Source: Architectural and Historic Resource Survey of Paris, Texas; Architexas, Architecture, Planning and Urban Design; A.C. Greene, Historian, August, 1985. ZONING ORDINANCE A Zoning Ordinance is a legislative tool used for implementing the Comprehensive Plan. It delineates the boundaries for land use districts to regulate: • use; • density of population; 4 un S:V8288\WPC\fmaI repwn 2-01.d: