Bastrop County Courthouse

I, too, got married there. Our judge was Weddle, though. We had gone to get our marriage license and they asked us if we were interested in getting married on Valentines day because he was doing free weddings that day. Well, being two crazy kids on a zero dollar budget (which is why we got married in Bastrop county instead of Travis, where we lived, because Travis was more expensive) we signed up. I researched courthouse weddings, and honestly, I was expecting something like you see in crime dramas, where you wait in a long hall until some uniformed person calls your name and you go in, say «yes, no, yes, no» etc until he says «You’re now married.» or something, and then you leave and the next couple walks in. It was NOTHING like that. We had a small group of family members and we all met at the back door and were let in to the court room. It was clean and nice (flowers, paintings, etc) and the judge was dressed in his judging gown (don’t know what it’s called) but he looked formal. Our witness lady was dressed nicely and was very nice in directing us around since we only had 30 minutes. My family was seated and my man and I were brought to the front. We had a short but emotional service and it was over… we were married. Then we got a copy of the ceremony paper thing (which we have framed in our house) and he wished us luck and we headed off to the church for the reception. It was so much better than I could have imagined for a courthouse. I’m glad we did it that way, and now we have more money to spend together, and not on a giant party that is over too soon.

This is where we got married. Overall, our experience was good.
Our wedding date was July 3^rd (2009), so I called way in advance to make sure that would work out since it was a Friday before a major holiday and we wanted to get married in the early afternoon. This ended up working out fine for Judge Benton Eskew’s schedule, so I went ahead and set things up with his secretary.
I called back a couple of weeks before the wedding to confirm the date/​time just to check, and I nearly passed out (really, at the time I had a heart condition that is now surgically corrected) when the secretary at first said she didn’t have it down in her book. But then she checked the Judge’s calendar, and our appointment was written down there. So everything was actually okay, it was just a bad scare (yep, that’s why 4 stars and not 5).
A few days before the wedding my now-​husband and I went to get our marriage license. The employee we interacted with was very nice, she made friendly conversation with us while getting everything ready. We were given a funny little book about marriage, which was much more gender-​equal than I expected.
Our actual wedding went great. The Judge and the other employees were very friendly, and accommodating of the fact that we brought a small group with us. We were surprised that the Judge had a page of bible verses to read out before marrying us … I realize that might bother others of course, and that’s why I’m mentioning it, but it wasn’t a big deal to us and probably made our families happy. He also spoke about the rings’ symbolic function, etc.
From what I’d previously heard about courthouse weddings, I had just been expecting something much more sterile/​perfunctory/​impersonal than what we got, so I was very happy. We have many great pictures from our ceremony (friends and family took them), when we were only expecting to have a few.
When we later got our marriage certificate in the mail we received another happy surprise: it was actually nice to look at! We were planning on displaying it in our home anyway, but we expedited the process since the certificate was so pretty.