Bare trees and a herd of black cattle on open winter pasture in Red River County, with a wooded horizon under an overcast sky.
Carol M. Highsmith / public domain via Library of Congress
Texas · Region

Sherman, Paris & the Red River Valley

Eisenhower's Denison birthplace and lake park, Hagerman refuge, Rayburn's Bonham farmhouse, Paris, the Gainesville memorial, Cooper Lake and Greenville.

10 places to explore

The Red River valley was Caddo country. The Handbook of Texas says Kadohadacho Caddo people held the valley from about A.D. 500, and names Caddo groups, among them the Kichai and Ionis, as the earliest known people in Grayson County. Chickasaw ferrymen later ran Colbert's crossing for the Butterfield stages, and the Katy railroad made Denison in 1872. Dwight Eisenhower was born beside its tracks in 1890. Eisenhower State Park and Hagerman refuge now line Lake Texoma, where the town of Hagerman once stood.

Cooke and Lamar counties voted against secession. In October 1862 militia hanged forty suspected Unionists at Gainesville, where a memorial now stands. On February 1, 1893, a crowd in Paris burned Henry Smith alive without a trial. On May 9, 1930, a mob set fire to the Sherman courthouse, killed George Hughes, and burned most of the Black business district.

Cotton, farms and politics fill the rest of the valley: Greenville's cotton museum and Audie Murphy, Sam Rayburn's Bonham farmhouse, Sam Bell Maxey's 1868 house and Evergreen Cemetery in Paris, and Cooper Lake, dedicated in 1991 after a lawsuit. Paris also has a 65-foot Eiffel Tower, built by the local welders' union in 1993 and topped with a red cowboy hat in 1998.

What to See in Sherman, Paris & the Red River Valley

10 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Natural Areas

Tall grassland and marsh edge at Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge, with the gray water of Lake Texoma and a far wooded shore under an overcast sky.

Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge

Sherman

A 1946 refuge on the Big Mineral Arm of Lake Texoma, laid over land bought for Denison Dam and the site of the vanished railroad town of Hagerman, now a winter stop for geese.

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Hikes & Trails

Wooden fishing pier extending over the open water of Cooper Lake, with a tree-lined shore under a sky of cumulus clouds.

Cooper Lake State Park

Cooper

Two units on Jim Chapman Lake, a Corps reservoir proposed in the late 1930s, stalled by a lawsuit until 1984 and dedicated in 1991, with a 10.5-mile equestrian trail and wildlife land around it.

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A rocky cove at Eisenhower State Park, with a wooden stairway leading down to a gravel shore and the blue water of Lake Texoma beyond wooded bluffs.

Eisenhower State Park

Denison

A bluff-top park on Lake Texoma opened in 1958 on land leased from the Corps of Engineers, in the Red River country of Fort Johnson, Colbert's Ferry and the Butterfield stages.

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Historic Sites

The white two-story frame Eisenhower birthplace in Denison with three gabled dormers and a second-floor porch, behind a white picket fence and large shade trees.

Eisenhower Birthplace State Historic Site

Denison

The small frame house beside the Katy tracks in Denison where Dwight Eisenhower was born in 1890, bought by townspeople in 1946 and given to Texas in 1958.

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A white marble robed figure leaning its head against a cross on a carved pedestal, with cedar and pine trees behind it, in Evergreen Cemetery in Paris.

Evergreen Cemetery

Paris

Paris's town cemetery since 1866, with a carved-stone gallery that includes the Babcock monument in cowboy boots, and the grave of the three-year-old whose death led to the 1893 lynching of Henry Smith.

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Great Hanging Memorial

Gainesville

Two granite monuments in a Gainesville park, dedicated in 2014, for the Cooke County men the Confederate militia hanged in October 1862 on suspicion of Unionism.

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The white clapboard Maxey House in Paris, an Italian villa-style home with carved brackets, a two-story porch with a balustrade, and green shutters, on a green lawn.

Sam Bell Maxey House State Historic Site

Paris

The Italian-villa-style house in Paris, finished in 1868 with a lawyer's fees, where a Confederate major general turned U.S. senator and two later generations of his family lived.

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The white two-story Sam Rayburn House near Bonham, with four white columns across the front, green shutters and a green roof with three dormers, seen across a lawn.

Sam Rayburn House State Historic Site

Bonham

The two-story farmhouse west of Bonham that the longtime Speaker of the House built in 1916 and kept as his home, left as he lived in it and open as a museum since 1975.

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Towns & Gateways

A museum display of a burlap-wrapped cotton bale cut open to show the lint, with a hanging scale, baskets, cotton sacks and large black-and-white photographs of cotton workers.

Audie Murphy / American Cotton Museum

Greenville

A Greenville museum of Hunt County's military heroes, including Audie Murphy, and of cotton, which keeps the engine of what it says was the world's largest inland cotton compress.

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Roadside Stops

The Paris, Texas Eiffel Tower replica, a black lattice tower topped with a giant red cowboy hat against a blue sky with cumulus clouds.

Eiffel Tower

Paris

A 65-foot Eiffel Tower with a red cowboy hat, built by the local welders' union in 1993 beside Paris's Love Civic Center.

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Sherman, Paris & the Red River Valley rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.

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