The Best Day Trips from Paris, Texas

Sam Rayburn was Speaker of the US House longer than anyone in history, and he kept living in the white frame house on Highway 56 the whole time. The Texas Historical Commission runs it as a state historic site with the family's own furnishings still in place, and a staff member walks the house with you rather than handing you a brochure.

Two miles away, the Sam Rayburn Library and Museum holds the research library he built in 1957, now operated by the University of Texas at Austin's Briscoe Center. Add Bonham State Park, 261 acres built by Civilian Conservation Corps Company 894 between 1933 and 1936 around a 65 acre lake, and you have a day without repeating yourself.

Hugo has called itself Circus City since the late 1930s, when a local businessman brought the Al G. Kelly Miller Bros. Circus to winter there. Carson and Barnes still keeps its winter quarters in town. The Endangered Ark Foundation is the retirement ranch that grew out of it, a nonprofit that houses what it describes as the second largest herd of Asian elephants in North America.

The other half of the trip costs nothing. Showmen's Rest, a section of Mount Olivet Cemetery, is where the circus families buried their own. Granite elephants flank the entrance and the headstones are carved with the trade of the person underneath, ringmasters and clowns and high wire acts. A monument in the middle reads a tribute to all showmen under God's big top.

The restrooms on Celebration Plaza are made entirely of two-way glass, put up in 2012 as a bid for a national best restroom title. From inside you look out at the giant outdoor chess set and the Hopkins County courthouse. From outside you see a mirror. People drive here for that alone, and it works better than it sounds because the plaza around it is a genuinely good downtown square with a water feature and a heavy events calendar.

The Southwest Dairy Museum, funded by dairy farmers across six states, covers milk production from the 1800s forward and has an old fashioned soda fountain called The Creamery at the end. Admission is free.

The North Sulphur River was channelized a century ago, and the cutting exposed Cretaceous marine beds. Ammonites, shark teeth and mosasaur fragments wash out of the banks after rain, and the park exists so the public can legally collect them. You take home what you pick up.

The park moved. The Upper Trinity Regional Water District built a permanent site just downstream of the Leon Hurse Dam, near where Baker Creek meets the river, with a covered pavilion and a paved path down to the water. The Lake Ralph Hall reservoir upstream is scheduled to begin filling around the end of 2026, so river access is a moving target. Check before you commit the day.

Two units sit on opposite shores of the same lake, and they are not interchangeable. Doctors Creek on the north side in Delta County is the closer one and the quieter one. South Sulphur, at 1690 FM 3505 outside Sulphur Springs, is larger and has the equestrian trails and most of the camping.

Texas Parks and Wildlife now lists the park as Cooper State Park, so searches turn up both names for the same place. Swimming, paddling, and largemouth bass and crappie fishing are the draw. Individual areas close for construction from time to time, and the department posts those on the park alerts page.

The 1933 Post Office and Courthouse straddles the Texas and Arkansas line, the only federal building in the United States that does. The General Services Administration describes the construction the way the city tells it, Texas granite at the base and Arkansas limestone above. The city painted a dashed line up the sidewalk outside so you can stand with a foot in each state.

The rest of the day is downtown. The Draughon-Moore Ace of Clubs House on Pine Street is a 22 sided Italianate house laid out in the shape of a club, run as a museum by the Texarkana Museums System. The restored Perot Theatre at Third and Main and the Scott Joplin mural a couple of blocks up fill the afternoon.

Eisenhower was born in a small frame house by the railroad tracks in Denison in 1890, and the Texas Historical Commission runs it as a state historic site with a visitor center attached. It is a modest building and the tour is honest about that, which is most of the point.

Pair it with water. Eisenhower State Park sits northwest of town on the south shore of Lake Texoma, land leased from the Army Corps of Engineers in 1954 and opened as a park in 1958. Most of it stands on limestone bluffs above the lake, with a swimming beach on one stretch of shoreline.

This is a half day rather than a full one, and it is the closest thing to Paris on the list. The Red River County Courthouse was completed in 1885 to a design by Dallas architect W. H. Wilson, built from sandstone quarried at Honey Grove, and restored in 2002 through the Texas Historic Courthouse Preservation Program. The original wood and the winding staircase to the district courtroom survived it.

Clarksville is a Texas Main Street city, so the square around it has antique stores, galleries and a few places to eat rather than plywood. The 1889 county jail nearby is a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark designed as a companion building to the courthouse.