Published: April 19, 2009 10:19 am      

The Courthouse Tour

Harry and Ellie Stewart complete journey through all 254 Texas counties

Harry and Ellie Stewart say they’re born tourists.

“We just like to travel,” Harry says with a shrug of his shoulders.

“We like the backroads,” his wife follows.

And they’ve got more than 130,000 miles on their Honda Odyssey to back up such claims.

The traveling companions have literally been all over the world. But for the past six years, the Stewarts have concentrated their efforts in Texas, by visiting every county courthouse in the state.

The Stewarts recently returned from a trip to north Texas where they saw 42 courthouses in five days, an endeavor that wrapped up their state-wide mission. On the final day of the trip, the two chatted with the Concho County Sheriff in Paint Rock who presented them with a Christmas ornament bearing the Paint Rock Courthouse on it, got their picture taken outside the front of the building, turned around and came home.

“It was a perfectly beautiful morning and a perfect ending to our great adventure,” Ellie said.

It’s an adventure that has given them both a true appreciation for the Lone Star state.

“We had been visiting light houses around the county for several years,” Harry said. “We’d been up and own the east and west coasts and around the Great Lakes. It got to where that was a real trip, there’s not that many lighthouses near San Marcos. So we thought about seeing things that might be a little closer.”

In Christmas of 2002, the courthouse idea arose after their daughter bought them a book summarizing every courthouse across the 254 counties. By February the next year, Ellie had a trip to Midland so the two took advantage by visiting several west Texas courthouses along the way.

Ellie organized their progress by color coding each trip on a state map. It took over a dozen excursions to cover the entire state, and anytime the couple went to visit relatives, they made it a point to stop by a few courthouses along the way.

“Essentially we would be going on another trip and we would stop by the courthouses,” Harry said. “Sometimes we’d go all the way to North Carolina to visit one daughter, and we’d come back another road so we could catch more (courthouses) further south.”

The most difficult task was capturing West Texas, they said.

“Well, the counties in West Texas can sometimes by 700 square miles,” Harry said. “It takes time.”

At each stop, they would first walk around the entire building deciphering where the front of the building was. They took a picture of the front and headed inside.

“One of the main things we wanted to see was the courtroom in each courthouse,” Ellie said. “All of them were pretty elaborate and pretty interesting... People were always really friendly and very eager to talk to us, once they realized what we were doing.”

One interesting court room in Llano County included a trap-door for the County Judge to escape through if court sessions got heated. The original courthouse in Zapata County still sits at the bottom of Amistad Lake after it was flooded years ago, but a replica is currently being built. One of their mutual favorites was the Hill County Courthouse, for its Romanesque architecture and the fact that it burned years ago, but had recently been rebuilt to its original glory.

The oldest courthouse they saw? The log cabin in Comanche County.

The two took note on the architectural style of the each courthouse, preferring the Romanesque and not so much the modern styles.

‘I had my own classification system for the courthouses: Beautiful courthouses, ugly courthouses and medium-ugly courthouses,” Harry said. “The modern is pretty ugly, way past medium-ugly.”

Even so, at times the trips weren’t even about the courthouses, but the friendly folks and the interesting side journeys along the way. While in Cuero, they happened to find Ellie’s great-grandmother’s grave: In fact, Harry stumbled right over it.

“I found out a while ago that she had died in Cuero. Well, when we stopped through we asked about the cemetery records, and we went to the cemetery but couldn’t find at first.”

The back end of the cemetery was overgrown with weeds, and as they tromped through, Harry tripped over a headstone that happened to be the one they were looking for.

“The funny thing is, her last name was Graves,” Harry said.

The son of an Air Force pilot, Harry took an airplane ride at age eight and immediately knew what he wanted to do professionally. He joined the Air Force after high school and served in both Vietnam and Korea, flying mainly tanker aircraft. He and Ellie, who grew up in Mexico City, met in Florida while he was stationed at Bartow Air Force Base and she was a student at Webber College. The two were set up on a blind date by their respective roommates.

As an Air Force family, travel came first as a necessity: They spent time in Florida, McGuire Base in New Jersey, upstate New York and even Manitoba, Canada. But the naturally curious travelers took advantage.

“When you’re in the Air Force for 20 years that makes you open to new things and places,” Ellie said. “We’ve just enjoyed seeing the world. We both do, and we’re fortunate. It doesn’t always work out that way.”

When they retired, they made a list of all the places the countries they wanted to visit. They set out to see all 50 states, which they’ve done, and even followed the Lewis and Clark trail along the Missouri River, a 4,000 mile journey. Earlier this year, they went to China.

So finally, with the courthouse adventure behind them, the Stewarts have a little time to lay low.

“Yeah, I think we’re just going to rest for a while,” Harry says.

“We are?” Ellie responds. “Maybe a couple of weeks.”

After all, there’s so much more to see.

“We’ve seen a lot of the national parks, but we’re missing a few in Washington. So we’ll probably try to finish up on those soon,” Ellie says.