HISTORY
Twentieth-century Montague County: Route 82, the Lake Nocona impoundment, the Nokona glove factory, county government, and what remains today.
Modern Montague County history runs from the agricultural consolidation of the 1920s through two world wars, the mid-century highway era, and into the present wind-energy and commuter-county economy. Population peaked around 1930 and has declined in most decades since.
Montague County sat at the edge of the Texas outlaw corridor during the lawless decades from 1865 to 1935. Sam Bass, the Doolin gang, Bonnie and Clyde, and local cattle thieves all operated in or near the county — but popular mythology has outpaced the documented record. A hard look at what the sources actually confirm.
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Montague County operates as a standard Texas county under Commissioners Court structure, with a County Judge, four Commissioners, and a full suite of elected and appointed officials serving roughly 20,000 residents from the 1913 Classical Revival courthouse in Montague. A practical guide to who does what and how rural Texas county government functions.
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Montague County has had six courthouse buildings since its organization in 1858 — two of them burned, one damaged by tornadoes, and the current 1913 Classical Revival structure now more than 110 years old. The courthouse arc traces the county's full trajectory from log-cabin frontier to cotton-era civic confidence, with the small county seat of Montague holding its seat against the larger ambitions of Bowie.
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Three federal highways form the backbone of Montague County's modern transportation network — US-287 north-south, US-82 east-west, US-81 along the eastern edge. The interstate system bypassed MoCo entirely, a fact with long-term economic consequences that shaped the county's character as much as any road that was actually built.
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The railroads that built Montague County's 19th-century economy mostly no longer operate. The Fort Worth and Denver Railway arrived in 1882, the Rock Island came in 1893, and together they created the cotton boom and founded multiple towns. Then came the abandonment era: the Rock Island bankrupt by 1980, track pulled, depots demolished, right-of-way returned to grass. What remains is a landscape shaped by lines that are gone.
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The Nokona Glove Company of Nocona, Texas, is one of the last domestic baseball glove manufacturers in the United States — born from Montague County's leather-craft ecosystem, transformed by a 1942 wartime contract, and still producing handmade gloves today.
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From the county's first school near Forestburg in 1858 through mid-20th-century consolidation, dozens of one-room schoolhouses formed the educational backbone of rural Montague County — community institutions as much as classrooms.
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From Korea through Vietnam and the Cold War, Montague County veterans served in every major American conflict of the mid-20th century while the home county stabilized economically and began its slow demographic shift from cotton and cattle toward the modern economy.
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Montague County was dry before national Prohibition, dry through it, and largely dry after. The result was a century-long tradition of bootlegging, hidden stills in cedar-choked creek bottoms, and a community memory that treats the moonshiner as a practical man rather than a criminal.
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Before the Rural Electrification Administration reached Montague County in the late 1930s and 1940s, rural farmsteads ran on kerosene, muscle, and windmills. The co-op lines that arrived changed everything — and the member-owned cooperatives built in that era are still running today.
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When the United States entered World War I in April 1917, Montague County men registered under the Selective Service Act, trained at Camp Bowie in Fort Worth, and deployed to France. At home, Liberty Bond drives, Red Cross chapters, and the Food Administration mobilized a county already reeling from boll weevil damage and post-cotton economic decline.
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World War II was Montague County's largest mobilization. Thousands of MoCo men served across every theater of the war. At home, the Nokona Glove Company converted its leather shop to produce 1,000 gloves a day for American servicemen — the county's most specific documented contribution to the wartime industrial effort.
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