Heritage Businesses
Six Montague County businesses earned national or regional significance that outlasted the enterprises themselves — or, in one case, continues to this day. Nokona still hand-stitches baseball gloves in Nocona, the last American manufacturer to do so.
Montague County's heritage businesses are not a random sample of what survived. They cluster around leather, trail culture, and community memory for reasons that trace directly to geography and the sequence of economic decisions made by specific people in specific years.
The thread begins in 1879, when H.J. Justin opened a cobbler's shop at the Chisholm Trail crossing in Spanish Fort to serve the cowboys and drovers moving cattle north to Kansas railheads. Justin's mail-order measurement system — customers traced their feet on paper and mailed the templates to Spanish Fort — built a customer base across Texas before the trail itself collapsed. When the Fort Worth and Denver Railway arrived and a new town called Nocona was platted in 1887, Justin moved his operation there in 1889. By the time his sons relocated the family enterprise to Fort Worth in 1925, Nocona had been a boot-industry town for three and a half decades and possessed something that does not transplant easily: skilled leatherworkers, tannery infrastructure, and a commercial culture organized around specialty craft manufacturing. Justin's daughter Enid stayed behind, borrowed $5,000 from a local bank, and on September 1, 1925, founded the Nocona Boot Company in deliberate defiance of the market logic that had sent her brothers west. She ran it for 56 years before the 1981 sale to Justin Industries reunited the divided family enterprise.
The leather ecosystem Enid Justin preserved made possible the third enterprise in the cluster. In 1926, Cadmus McCall and T.B. Wilkes founded the Nocona Leather Goods Company in the same town, using the same manufacturing infrastructure, making wallets, purses, and belts. The pivot toward baseball gloves came from Bob Storey of the founding family, who recognized that a baseball glove is a precision leather article requiring exactly the craft skills Nocona's workers already possessed. The company trademarked the "Nokona" spelling in 1934 because federal trademark law would not permit a town's own name on a product mark. A 1942 US government contract scaled production to 1,000 gloves per day for American service
Built in 1873 as Saint Jo's first permanent structure, the Stonewall Saloon served Chisholm Trail drovers until the trail's decline and reopened as a nonprofit heritage museum in 1958 — one of north Texas's most intact Chisholm Trail-era commercial buildings.
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H.J. Justin founded the Justin Boot Company in Spanish Fort, Texas, in 1879 — a single-cobbler operation serving Chisholm Trail drovers that grew into one of the most recognized Western boot brands in the world, reshaping Montague County's identity before departing for Fort Worth in 1925.
Read article →When her brothers moved the family boot company to Fort Worth in 1925, Enid Justin stayed in Nocona and founded a rival enterprise at age 30. For 56 years she built Nocona Boot Company into a national Western boot brand — kept the leather industry in Montague County — and lived to see the family business reunited when Justin Industries acquired her company in 1981.
Read article →The Nokona Glove Company of Nocona, Texas, is America's last domestic baseball glove manufacturer — a nearly century-old enterprise born from the same leather-crafts ecosystem as the Justin and Nocona boot companies, hardened by a 1942 WWII military contract, and still producing handmade gloves in north Texas today.
Read article →The Tales 'N' Trails Museum in Nocona, Texas, is Montague County's primary heritage institution — preserving the county's frontier, leather industry, oil and gas, agricultural, and Native American heritage, anchored by an animatronic figure of Enid Justin that recounts the Nocona Boot Company story in her own recorded voice.
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