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171 16 Siting Paris North, beyond Houston Creek, auto-oriented roadside businesses and subdivisions announce the entry into Paris; in 2010 the city was the third largest urban place on the road, with a population of 8,553 (a decline of 630 people from 2000).1 The city’s retail and commercial core, its oldest section, is two miles farther along the road. To interpret and understand transitional landscapes such as this one requires patience and considered observation. Imagine this transect two centuries ago, when the surrounding land stood open. The only landmarks here were isolated farm building clusters, the Limestone Trace’s muddy track, and perhaps some smoke on the horizon ahead rising from the chimneys of a small cluster of buildings standing near Stoner Creek. Basic geographical decisions as to farm and town location were based on straightforward pragmatics. Farmsteads required a year-round freshwater supply, standing timber for fuel, fencing, and construction materials, and open expanses of fertile land. Central Kentucky’s early settlers, therefore, often chose as their first priority firstgeneration farmhouse sites close to perennial springs. Prime town sites combined access to water, fuel and construction wood, overland roads, and streams that, if not navigable, had flow sufficient to power a grist- or sawmill. When Virginia surveyors arrived in the Kentucky country in search of good land, the site that became Paris met their requirements. The meandering Houston and Stoner creeks, two major tributaries of the Licking River’s South Fork, join here in a way that created a broad-shouldered peninsula flanked by streams on three sides, much as William Penn’s site for Philadelphia was bounded east, west, and south by the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. The Paris site featured a beneficial elevation of more than one hundred feet above creek level, which assured settlers that unless they defiantly erected structures directly on the floodplain, the menace of periodic floods could be largely avoided. The streams here offered modest navigability but had unambiguous potential for water-powered mill sites. And a minor alignment adjustment in the Limestone Trace allowed passage through the town via single crossings of Stoner Creek on the north and Houston Creek on the south, not the multiple crossings that a town site farther north would have necessitated. If choosing a geographically propitious town site was more or less a straightforward process, the land patenting and surveying practices that permitted settlers to establish 172  The Maysville Road: A Landscape Biography farms and towns was fraught with complicated legal entanglements. Colonel John Floyd, deputy surveyor for William Preston of Fincastle County, Virginia, completed the earliest land survey of two hundred acres here in 1776 on behalf of Walter Stewart . By virtue of his service in the British 44th Regiment of Foot during the French and Indian War, Stewart had earned a land claim right, which John Floyd surveyed for him here.2 The land grant was delayed until 1780, and Walter Stewart never established residence in Bourbon County. Assignees of John May, John Craig, and Robert Johnston of Fayette County received an overlapping claim of 1,000 acres here in 1785. Craig and Johnston, in turn, assigned 500 acres to John Reed of Jefferson County, Kentucky, in 1787. Reed sold 250 acres to Lawrence Protzman of Hagerstown, Maryland , in 1789. Protzman moved to Bourbon County in 1788 and is credited with establishing the town of Paris. Lawrence Protzman persuaded James Lanier of Cumberland, North Carolina, to join him in developing the town. The two men sent a petition signed by 117 Bourbon County citizens to the Virginia Assembly on September 2, 1789, requesting that a town be established around the courthouse that already stood on Protzman’s land. The Assembly authorized the town, called Hopewell, in October 1789, designated Lawrence Protzman proprietor, and named nine citizens as trustees. On his behalf, Protzman’s attorney, Thomas Jones, surveyed and marked town lots and conveyed and signed deeds in 1789.3 Within a year the possibility of an overlap between the land claims of Walter Stewart and the land Protzman had purchased from John Reed came to the trustees’ attention. Conflicts over land in Kentucky were so commonplace that it was a rare landowner who did not have to resort to the courts to establish legal title. Many people lost their land or suffered serious financial reversals, and Protzman was no exception. He was involved in several lawsuits, including one brought against him by his partner, James Lanier. Protzman’s legal troubles alarmed...

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