Heritage Businesses
Built to last.
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.
Justin boot-making began in Spanish Fort in 1879 and grew into a Western brand carried in every western-wear store in the country. The Nocona Boot Company, founded by Enid Justin in 1925, sustained the leather-goods identity of a town built on the trade. The Stonewall Saloon in Saint Jo operated during the cattle-drive era and now survives as a museum on the town square. KMA Oilfield, the North Nocona field discovered in 1922, produced an estimated 100 million barrels and remains one of the defining economic events in the county's modern era.
These are not merely local curiosities. They represent a pattern: a county on the edge of Anglo Texas settlement developed specialized industries — boots, leather goods, sporting goods — that became nationally recognized because proximity to raw materials, rail access, and concentrated family expertise compounded into durable competitive advantage.
These profiles differ from the business directory in one important way: the research behind them runs to thousands of words of archival material, and their significance is primarily historical rather than transactional. The directory lists where to buy things today. The heritage business profiles explain how the county's commercial identity was built.
Stonewall Saloon Museum
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.
Justin Boot Company
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.
Nocona Boot Company
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.
Nokona Baseball Glove Company
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.
Tales 'N' Trails Museum
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.