About 50 courthouse aficionados turned out for Rhett Turner’s talk about his new book of photographs of Georgia’s 159 courthouses at the Carter Center last week.

Georgia has more counties and courthouses than any other state except Texas, in part because it’s a big state—the largest east of the Mississippi. According to lore, Turner said, judges and lawyers did not want to have to travel more than a day on horseback to get to the local courthouse, which is why the state has so many.