Paris, TX Photo - Looking at This Photo, You can Easily Guess That it was Taken in Paris TX

Looking at this photo, you can easily guess that it was taken in Paris . . . Texas. The clue is found at the top of the tower. For years, Paris, Texas -- the world's second-largest city of that name -- battled with its namesake city in Tennessee, which also built a replica Eiffel Tower. When Tennessee redid its tower inthe 1990s to make it a few feet higher, the Texas town retaliated with its bright-red ten-gallon hat, nudging the structure's tower a smidgen higher than the one in Tennessee. An earlier wooden tower in town had been destroyed by a tornado.

Carol M. Highsmith (born 1946) is a photographer, author, and publisher who has photographed all 50 of the United States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico for 30 years. She specializes in documenting architecture, ranging from the monumental to the everyday and whimsical. Highsmith is donating her life ’s work of more than 100,000 images, copyright-free, to the Library of Congress, which established a rare one-person archive. Out of 14 million images, the Carol M. Highsmith collection is featured in the top six alongside of Mathew Brady and Dorethea Lange. Credit line: Photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Credit line: The Lyda Hill Texas Collection of Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith's America Project, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.