On a 2014 drive from Austin to Denver for an improv festival, David Lampe and I entertained ourselves with a little app I had that listed every historic marker in the cities we drove through. I’d skim through the list as we approached each little town, and if something really piqued our interest, we made a quick stop.
The frequent highlight of these (often the only highlight) were the courthouses, one per county, which gave our long road trip a nice tempo. This bit of entertainment caused us to zig-zag our route and spot as many courthouses as possible, and—starting with Hartley County Courthouse (Channing TX, built 1906)—photograph them.
“Wouldn’t it be fun,” our caffeinated conversation inevitably went, “if someone visited every county courthouse in Texas?” Fun might not be the word some would use. Texas has 254 county courthouses1 spread over an area bigger than France, most of it empty space punctuated by cattle herds and Dollar General stores. But, over the following six and a half years, that’s exactly what I did.
At first, I took pictures of courthouses as I happened to pass them by. On every visit to mom’s place in Nashville, I varied my route to hit new ones. Before long I was making dedicated day trips, stopping for as little as 30 seconds to snap a single photo before driving on. Many times, I found myself racing the sunset to get a courthouse photo before it was too dark. In the more remote corners of Texas—and friends, there are a whole lot of those—these were effectively now-or-never opportunities.
My bingo map of Texas slowly filled over the years. I had no particular endpoint in mind for the project until 2020, when I made the big decision to move to Europe at the end of the year. This put me on deadline with over 80 courthouses to go! But thanks to a little thing called COVID, I found myself with a lot of free weekends. So I tackled them a dozen or so at a time in long looping day trips. The project reached its nail-biting climax in December 2020: one day after quitting my job, one week before flying to Amsterdam, I visited the last few dozen in a single epic four-day journey that methodically criss-crossed the Panhandle like I was mowing the lawn.
But—you are surely asking, your voice raised—Kevin, why?? It’s not too complicated: I love road trips, I love old buildings, and—despite its long, undeniable list of flaws—I love the state of Texas. Taking a single picture of the courthouse in each of our counties, accruing unknown thousands of miles, was a decent way to scratch all of those itches at once. Even if only for a few minutes, I passed through almost every corner of this enormous state, visiting places I’d never seen before and never will again.
Dozens of times over the years, people shared the thought: “You should make a book!” My initial response was simple: There are already Texas-county-courthouse books! At least four of them, in fact. You’ve probably noticed Texas has its fair share of super-fans. I’m neither the only person to have completed this stunt, nor to have published the results.
But the peer pressure wore me down, and I started to riff on the idea. I knew for a fact that not all of my pictures were print-worthy, so any book would need to comprise a subset. “I dunno,” I mused one day, “maybe I’ll make a book called The 90 Prettiest Courthouses in Texas and the 10 Ugliest.” Like so many off-the-cuff jokes in my life2, it stuck.