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THE FOUNDING and lots. Concerning this first survey, he wrote as follows to Horace Capron: I have had a surveyor employed to lay out a town-plot, which is nearly completed. I will shortly send you a beautiful plan of said town, which I intend to call Paris, being built upon a plaster bed, which lots I am offering gratis to actual settlers. By March 5, 1830, the surveyor, Lewis Burwell, had marked out a number of streets by blazing trees and driving stakes, and had drafted six maps for $37.00. (His wages were $3.oo a day, and he was paid mostly in goods, including an order on the Long Point Furnace for a Franklin stove at $28.oo and a cook stove at $60.oo.) He also made village-surveys south of Dundas Street for Robert Rose- burgh, who had bought a lease to a block of land there. When this survey was made, Capron expected that the main business thoroughfare of the Lower Town would be Broadway; that the mill streets would be Mechanic, West River, and East River (now Grand River); and that the residential streets would be William, Charlotte, and Emily (all named in honor of his children). In 1830, the new village was still officially known as the Forks of the Grand. Capron disliked the name: he thought it too long and cumbersome, and too unromantic. He wanted to call his village "Paris". Of course the plaster of Paris beds suggested the name; but ! so did the white-plastered houses, the Grand River with its two elm-crowned islands, the beautiful heights that encircled the Forks, and a strange and subtle beauty that pervaded the place and en- tranced all who felt its presence. But although the majority of villagers disliked "Forks of the Grand", they shrank from "Paris" - a name then associated with I~~~~~~~~~~~ · mobs, guillotines, and ambitious ladies. And so, in January 1831, after a village meeting, Capron instructed Lewis Burwell to inscribe the name "Nithsville" upon maps of the village survey. In March, however, for unknown reasons, he again changed the name: he ad- vertised as follows in The Western Mercury: 200 Tons of Ground Plaster: For sale at my mill in Parisville at six dollars a ton or 26 bushels H. Capron, Dumfries. Finally, in December i831, the villagers agreed upon "Paris", and Capron used the name when he advertised in The Western Mercury for the relatives of Patrick O'Connor, who "when cutting timber with some others was killed near the village of Paris on the Grand River by the falling of a tree." In 1830, the Founder of Paris began another important project - the development of his water-rights. He first built a large dam on the present site of the Wincey Mill dam at the end of William Street; and then he enlarged Holme's race, which cut across to the Grand 19