Nokona: The Last American-Made Baseball Glove Is Made Right Here in Nocona

Every Nokona baseball glove made in 2026 is made in Nocona, Texas, by workers whose craft descends from a leather-goods tradition nearly a century old. That sentence is either unremarkable or extraordinary depending on how much you know about the American sporting goods industry — and the more you know, the more extraordinary it becomes.

Born Into a Leather Town

Nokona's story begins in 1926, in a town already defined by leather. H.J. "Daddy Joe" Justin had moved his boot operation to Nocona in 1889, and when his sons relocated the company to Fort Worth in 1925, his daughter Enid stayed and immediately founded the Nocona Boot Company. By 1926, Nocona had an unusual concentration of tanneries, skilled leather workers, and a commercial culture built around specialty goods. Into that ecosystem, the Storey family launched what they called the Nocona Leather Goods Company — making wallets, purses, and belts before Bob Storey, who had played baseball at Rice and UT, proposed applying the town's leather expertise to baseball gloves.

The company's most distinctive feature — the "k" in Nokona — was a legal workaround. When the Storeys sought to trademark "Nocona" for their gloves, federal trademark law would not permit a town's name as a product mark. They substituted the "k" for the "c," trademarked "Nokona" in 1934, and created a brand that traded on its Texas origin while clearing the legal barrier. The homophone was obvious to any customer who read the label.

The War That Transformed the Factory

In 1942, the United States government awarded Nokona a military contract to produce gloves for the armed forces. The contract's scale was transformational. Before the war, the Nocona operation produced approximately 50 to 100 gloves per day — a craft-shop pace. Under the military contract, production scaled to 1,000 gloves per day, a tenfold increase that required workforce expansion, floor reorganization, and accelerated supply chains. Nokona emerged from the war years with an expanded operation, a proven production capacity, and the institutional credibility of having contributed materially to the war effort. For the broader story of Montague County's home-front contribution, see the WWII service and home front history page.

The Innovation That Defined the Brand

In 1957, Nokona introduced the first baseball glove made with kangaroo leather — the first manufacturer to use kangaroo hide in glove production. The technical logic was sound: kangaroo hide is lighter than cowhide at equivalent thickness, has higher tensile strength per unit of weight than virtually any comparable hide, and resists moisture absorption. For a baseball glove, those properties mean a lighter feel with excellent durability — qualities that players at the highest levels recognized immediately.

The kangaroo-leather innovation arrived at a pivotal moment. Through the 1960s and 1970s, the major American glove brands — Rawlings, Wilson, Spalding — were moving production to Asia, where labor costs made offshore manufacturing financially irresistible. Brand after brand shifted. Nokona did not. The decision carried a real cost: Nokona gloves were more expensive than offshore alternatives, which constrained their share of the mass consumer market. But it also built a brand identity that proved increasingly durable. In a market segment defined by players who cared about craft, "Made in Nocona, Texas" carried genuine weight.

The Fire and What Followed

On July 18, 2006, the Nokona factory burned to the ground. Losses exceeded $5,000,000. For a company of Nokona's scale, this was potentially existential. The company's response became one of the defining stories of its institutional character: Nokona resumed production within ten days of the fire. No employee lost wages. The company relocated temporarily to the Old Nocona Boot Factory — the former Enid Justin facility — before moving to a new production site. That the leather infrastructure of one Nocona enterprise could temporarily sustain another illustrates how deeply the town's industrial identity is embedded in its built environment.

A Century, Nearly Complete

Rob Storey, third-generation, assumed leadership in 1992 and made the American-made positioning an explicit brand identity rather than an inherited default. By then, Rawlings had moved virtually all production overseas. Wilson had followed. The mass market was dominated by Asian-manufactured gloves. In that context, Nokona's domestic manufacturing was not merely tradition — it was a competitive differentiator that no offshore-sourced brand could claim.

The Nocona Economic Development Corporation identifies Nokona as one of the town's signature heritage enterprises, alongside baseball great Charlie Robertson — who grew up in Nocona and pitched one of the seventeen perfect games in major league history on April 30, 1922 — and rodeo champion Ruth Roach Salmon. The Tales 'N' Trails Museum in Nocona, which opened in 2010 after fifteen years of community fundraising, includes Nokona in its leather-industry exhibits alongside the Justin and Nocona Boot companies.

Nokona has been producing gloves in Nocona, Texas, for nearly one hundred years. Through depression, wartime conversion, overseas competitive pressure, and a factory-destroying fire, the company has maintained domestic manufacturing in a town of three thousand people. That is, in the context of American manufacturing history, a remarkable thing.