The Lady Makes Boots: Enid Justin and the Nocona Boot Company

Bootmaker Enid Justin at a sewing machine in the stitching department of her new factory in June 1948. Enid Justin - Nocona Boot Company Collection (BA15), University of North Texas Special Collections.

“Enid Justin started her career by stepping into a man’s shoes. Now thousands of men are stepping into hers.”

—Fort Worth Star Telegram, July 18, 1968

The headline of the local newspaper announced in bold type “Nocona Boot Closing Down: Western legend comes to an end at 74 years.” On August 25, 1999, the last pair of Nocona boots rolled off the production line at the famous factory in Nocona, Texas. That day marked the end of a company whose reputation for producing quality boots was unsurpassed, and it left a small North Texas town without the institution that had defined it for three quarters of a century. The history of Nocona Boot Company is a shining example of American entrepreneurship, and its story is made even more exceptional by the fact that its founder and president was a woman.¹

Enid Justin founded the Nocona Boot Company in 1925. Her business was not only successful; it set the standard for quality in the boot-making industry. Her story is one of vision, determination, hard work, and giving back to the community. It is also a story of one woman’s rise to success in an industry traditionally dominated by men. Enid’s life story and the history of her company are so intertwined that they must be told together. The residents of Nocona fondly called her Miss Enid. (Because there are so many Justin family members involved in the telling of her story, she will be referred to throughout as Enid.)

At age thirteen, Enid quit school and went to work in her father’s shop; “Daddy Joe” Justin was a bootmaker. She was not a poor student—quite the contrary—but she was strong-willed. The year was 1907, and when the school superintendent learned that Enid had danced with a boy at a birthday party, he suspended her for three weeks. When told of her punishment, Enid replied, “Anybody that thinks there’s a party going on in my own home and I’m going upstairs to go to bed has something else to think about!” In reflecting on that decision, she opined, “That wasn’t very smart, but I said it anyway … and I never bothered to go back to school.” That determination was a trait that remained with her throughout her life and ultimately served her well. In telling this story years later she questioned, “I don’t know why Mother and Daddy Joe didn’t make me go back,” but she speculated it was because they needed her help at the factory.²

Enid began working at her father’s boot shop after school and on Saturdays when she was just ten years old, and by age twelve she was stitching boot tops on an old foot-pedal Singer sewing machine. When she quit school, Enid became a full-time employee, and she was eager to learn all she could about the business her father started in 1879 in Spanish Fort, Texas.³

Enid’s father, Joe Justin, came to Texas by train from his family’s home in Lafayette, Indiana. After a two-year stay in Gainesville where he worked as a cobbler’s apprentice, Justin set out by wagon for Spanish Fort, a small community that bordered the Chisholm Trail. He carried a few tools of his new trade, enough leather to make one pair of boots, and twenty-five cents in shin-plasters, a form of paper currency widely circulated in frontier economies. He began doing shoe and boot repair in the shop of the town barber, Frank See, who was also a newcomer to Spanish Fort. See recognized Justin’s talent and loaned him thirty-five dollars to buy the hides he needed to start making boots. Justin opened his shop in a small vacant building just off the town square. He...