Paris stands in the heart of a rich farming area. Most of the land in Edgar County, including Paris, remained Kickapoo hunting grounds until 1819, though the county’s eastern quarter was part of a tract ceded by Indians in 1809 and offered for sale at Vincennes as early as 1816. Edgar County was established in 1823, and Paris was laid out that April on twenty-six acres donated by Samuel Vance, with the Edgar County Court House at the center of the parcel. Alone or with others, Vance laid out the earliest roads from Paris in 1823-1824: one later known as the lower Terre Haute Road and still traveled today, one to Darwin, then the seat of Clark County, one to the Vermilion Salines near Danville that formed part of the Vincennes Trace and is now a section of Illinois Route 1 to Chicago, and one to Marshall, now the seat of Clark County. At 130 South Central Avenue stands the former home of Milton K. Alexander, a brigadier general in the Illinois Mounted Volunteers during the Black Hawk War of 1832; the house was built in 1828 and enlarged in 1840. Alexander knew Abraham Lincoln, who often came to Paris as a lawyer when Edgar County was in the Eighth Judicial Circuit. Lincoln spoke in Paris on August 6, 1856, for Republican presidential candidate John C. Fremont, and again on September 7, 1858, during his unsuccessful campaign against Stephen A. Douglas for the United States Senate. Many early settlers in Paris came from the South, and during the Civil War there were many southern sympathizers called copperheads.