Founder
Enid JustinThe Decision That Made a Company
On September 1, 1925, a thirty-year-old woman named Enid Justin signed the founding papers for the Nocona Boot Company in Nocona, Texas. She did it the week her brothers moved the Justin Boot Company — the family enterprise their father H.J. Justin had built over four decades — to Fort Worth.
The move to Fort Worth made economic sense by the calculations of 1925: larger labor pool, better rail connections, proximity to a major urban market. Enid understood the reasoning and rejected it anyway. Her father had brought his cobbler’s shop from Spanish Fort to Nocona in 1889, had built the business in this town, had raised his family here. Moving it to Fort Worth was a repudiation of that founding geography. She declined to participate.
What she did instead was file incorporation papers, borrow $5,000 from a local Nocona bank, and begin manufacturing Western boots from the same town, for the same general market, as the company her brothers had just relocated. The choice was clear-eyed and deliberate — she was not staying in Nocona because she lacked options. She was staying because she believed the boot industry belonged here.
Building from Nothing
The early years of Nocona Boot Company required exactly the kind of sustained determination that most founding narratives compress into a sentence. Enid was not inheriting a going concern; she was starting a competitor to a company that had been operating for 46 years, with established brand recognition, national distribution, and the accumulated goodwill of the Justin family name.
Her initial copartnership included Julius L. Steltzer and Jess B. Thompson as co-partners. (The TSHA Handbook of Texas records the surname as Steltzer; earlier accounts rendered it Stelzer — the TSHA form is the authoritative spelling.) The founding capital was modest by any measure; the borrowed $5,000 represented the financial floor beneath a company that had to generate revenue immediately to survive.
The product line was straightforward: Western boots, direct competition to Justin’s offering, differentiated by the specific craftsmanship and design choices Enid brought from a lifetime inside the boot business. She had started working in the trade at approximately age twelve, had learned every aspect of construction and finishing, and could evaluate quality at the level of the individual stitch. This knowledge was not inherited capital — it was earned expertise, and it became the company’s quality standard.
By 1934, Enid had bought out her co-partners and become sole owner. In that year she also began a push to expand distribution outside Texas, which had been the company’s initial geographic focus. By 1935, Nocona Boot Company was selling nationally — building a presence in the broader Western boot market that had been Justin’s territory since the 1880s.
The Depression Years and the National Market
The timing of the company’s founding placed its formative decade squarely in the Depression. The 1930s were not an obvious moment for a new luxury-goods manufacturer to build a national brand; discretionary spending on quality boots dropped sharply as agricultural incomes collapsed across the Southwest.
Enid’s response was to hold the quality standard and expand distribution. The Depression compressed the market but did not eliminate it. Ranchers still needed boots; serious Western-wear buyers still valued a well-made boot over a cheap substitute. Nocona Boot Company positioned itself at the craft end of the market — the price point where quality was the argument — and built customer relationships that survived the lean years and provided the foundation for postwar expansion.
When World War II ended and consumer spending recovered, Nocona Boot was positioned to grow. The postwar Western wear boom created the mass market that had not existed in 1925: returning veterans, suburban leisure, the cultural ascendance of Western identity through film and television. Cowboys on screen translated to Western boots in stores. Nocona Boot had a national distribution network and a reputation for quality when this market expanded.
”Miss Enid” and the Culture of the Company
No account of Nocona Boot Company is complete without acknowledging that its identity was inseparable from its founder’s personal character.
Enid Justin was known to her employees, customers, and community as “Miss Enid” — a form of address that combined respect with the formality her management style naturally generated. She knew the production floor. She knew every operation in the plant. She held quality standards that employees understood were not negotiable. The company’s reputation for craftsmanship reflected her own standards applied at scale.
This personal quality extended to community life in Nocona. The Nocona Boot Company was a major employer in a town of modest size, and Enid’s decisions about wages, conditions, and community engagement carried weight that the factory’s economic significance would have required even if she had been less personally engaged. She was, by most accounts, more engaged — a civic figure whose presence in the town extended well beyond the walls of the boot plant.
The TSHA Handbook of Texas entry for Nocona Boot Company describes her as a pioneer for women in industry: “the first woman in bootmaking.” In 1925 that was straightforwardly remarkable. Women of the period operated small retail and service businesses with some frequency; women founding and running a manufacturing company that would grow to employ hundreds of workers over several decades was genuinely exceptional.
56 Years: The Long Run
Enid Justin ran the Nocona Boot Company for 56 years — from its 1925 founding to the 1981 acquisition by Justin Industries. That span covers the Depression, World War II, the postwar boom, the growth of the Western boot market through the 1960s and 1970s, and the consolidation wave that brought major shoe and boot brands under corporate umbrella structures.
Throughout that period, the company remained in Nocona. The production facility, the workforce, the management — all of it stayed in the town where the company had been founded in deliberate defiance of the market pressure to relocate.
When John Justin Jr., leading the Fort Worth-based Justin Industries, approached Enid about an acquisition, she was 87 years old. She had built what she set out to build. The 1981 sale reunited the family business — Justin Boot and Nocona Boot, divided since 1925, under a single corporate structure — 56 years after the rupture that had created the Nocona Boot Company in the first place. Enid lived another nine years, dying in October 1990 at age 96.
What Remained
The Nocona Boot Company as an independent enterprise ended in 1981. The Nocona Boots brand continued under Justin Industries, then under Acme Building Brands after the 2000 acquisition of Justin Industries — the label surviving the ownership change as a market identity, if not as the Nocona-based independent company Enid Justin had run.
What remained in the town was something harder to quantify: the workforce and manufacturing culture that Enid Justin had built and sustained across six decades. When the Nokona Glove Company needed emergency production space after its 2006 factory fire, it relocated temporarily to the Old Nocona Boot Factory — Enid’s facility, standing empty after Justin Industries had consolidated operations. The building’s availability for that purpose was itself a measure of how deeply the boot industry’s physical infrastructure had embedded itself in Nocona’s built environment.
Today the Tales ‘N’ Trails Museum in Nocona preserves the most vivid memorial to Enid Justin’s enterprise: an animatronic figure of Miss Enid that recounts the Nocona Boots story in her own recorded voice. It is, as memorials go, appropriate — a woman who spent 56 years building a company in the town her family had left, speaking directly to visitors about why she stayed.
Learn more about the Justin Boot Company’s founding story in Spanish Fort and Nocona, the broader Nocona leather-crafts ecosystem at Nokona Baseball Glove Co., and all heritage businesses of Montague County.
Sources
- TSHA Handbook of Texas, “Nocona Boot Company” and “Herman Joseph Justin” (tshaonline.org)
- Humanities Texas, “Enid Justin” and “Born into Boots: An Interview with Enid Justin” (humanitiestexas.org)
- Lipscomb, Carol A. (2021). The Lady Makes Boots: Enid Justin and the Nocona Boot Company, Texas Tech University Press
- Portal to Texas History, “Enid Justin — Nocona Boot Company Collection” (texashistory.unt.edu/explore/collections/EJNBC/)