Welcome to Wright Courthouse Photos.
This is a showcase of our grandfather, Bill Wright's, quest to personally photograph every county courthouse in America.
Bill was born in Kiowa County, OK in 1931. He grew up in southwest Oklahoma and earned a degree in geology from Oklahoma A&M. Bill was part of the track team while at Oklahoma A&M and was proud of setting an NCAA record in the freshman 440 yard relay in 1950. After college he served as an officer in the Army Corps of Engineers, helping to rebuild the airport in Frankfurt, Germany. Returning to America he worked for most of his career as a petroleum geologist, with entrepreneurial ventures in publishing and consumer products. He continued his love for athletics after school, becoming a well-respected track and field official specializing in the long jump - even serving at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. Bill passed away in 2023.
Bill began this project in 1970 while on a road trip through Texas, deciding to detour through each county he traveled to take a picture of the courthouse. There was no initial idea to visit every county, but traveling for work and track and field officiating, he took more and more detours. By the late 70s he had the insane thought "Maybe i could get all of them..."
We have to mention a small technicality. Bill reached every "county" courthouse, but there are a couple "boroughs" (functionally equivalent subvisions) in northern and western Alaska which proved exceedingly difficult to get to and were not visited. We don't think this disqualifies the labor, especially since these boroughs' courthouses were only staffed part-time and could only be reached by chartered plane. Every other county (or "parishes" in Louisiana) was visited and the courthouse photographed.
Bill always imagined that these photos would be composed into a coffee-table book. Even fitting 6 photos to a page, this would put you over 500 pages. Given the size and the fact that this is sort of reference work (of limited demand), we haven't yet gone forward with this idea. If you're interested, please reach out though, he would be delighted.
In his retirement he would occasionally collect facts about the counties, with the idea that these would be included as captions. There aren't enough to include here but you can find out these sorts of things by clicking on the link to the Wikipedia article included with each county.
All photos were taken by Bill Wright.
Photo digitization was done by Eric Wright and Karen Wright.
This website was built by Thomas Wright with design input from Eric Wright.