Paris, TX Photo - A replica Eiffel Tower with a Texas accent in Paris, Texas

A replica Eiffel Tower with a Texas accent in Paris, Texas. There's a Texas-sized story of rivalries behind it. There are 15 American municipalities named "Paris," and more than a few have chosen to erect Eiffel Tower replicas to pay homage to their French namesake. Both Paris of Texas and Paris of Tennessee dedicated their Eiffel Tower replicas in 1993. Texas's was built by a local ironworker's union and was 65 feet tall. But when Tennessee moved its tower to Paris it asserted its dominance by adding another ten feet -- looking down on Texas at 70 feet tall. That left Paris, Texas, and its claim to be the "Second Largest Paris in the World" ringing hollow. So in 1998 town boosters added a large red cowboy hat to the tip of the tower, saucily tilted to push a few extra feet into the lower atmosphere. Alas for both Texas and Tennessee, in 1999, Las Vegas, Nevada, erected a 540-foot-tall Eiffel Tower replica along the Strip. At half the height of the original, this Eiffel Tower is nearly ten times taller than the other replicas.

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.