Nocona Boot Company was founded in 1925 in Nocona, TX, by Enid Justin when her brothers moved their father's company (H.J. Justin & Sons) to Fort Worth. She believed her father would have wanted the business to remain in Nocona. The company was initially a copartnership with her husband, Julius L. Steltzer (later company president), Jess B. Thompson, and E.D. Keller, and retained 5 employees who had worked for her father's boot making factory.  The new company began with a borrowed $5,000 and was housed in a small rented building that had been one of her father's early plants, with necessary machinery leased from United Machine Company in St. Louis. The company incorporated in 1926 and issued stock. Successful in part due to the oil boom and demand for quality, high laced workboots, Nocona weathered the Depression and prejudice towards a "lady bootmaker."  Enid became the company's president in 1934 and began marketing the boots outside of Texas in 1936. The company acquired automated machinery and enjoyed continued success despite leather shortages during World War II. Additional plants were added in the immediate region to keep up with demand and the Nocona Boot Company Western Store was opened in 1949. Though sales slumped in the 1950's, the 1960's and 1970's saw increases in sales and the company thrived as part of the "glamorization" of bootmaking. A new plant on Highway 82 went into operation in 1948 was 33,000 square feet and employed about 100 workers. In 1972, 26,000 square feet were added and 250 laborers employed. In 1981, the Nocona plant had 89,000 square feet and 500 employees, while another plant that had been built in Vernon, Texas, during 1977, had 26,000 square feet and 150 workers. As plant size increased, output rose. Four hundred and fifty boots were produced daily in 1948, 1,200 in 1972, and 1,700 in 1981. By this time, Nocona boots were sold at thousands of outlets in every state in the Union and overseas. Justin had begun introducing computerized production into the plant in 1980. In 1948, her sales were about $1 million, in 1972, approximately $8 million, and by 1981 roughly $27 million. Innovative marketing and advertising techniques and the introduction of numerous made to order styles increased the company's success.  The Nocona plant was briefly unionized in the mid-'70s, but the union failed after one year. In 1981 the Nocona Boot Company was acquired by Justin Industries, and was closed in 1999 when Justin Industries consolidated boot making operations at El Paso, Texas and Cassville, Missouri, thus ending more than a century of quality boot-making in Nocona.  Based on: Richard L. Himmel, "NOCONA BOOT COMPANY," Handbook of Texas Online (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/dln01), accessed March 28, 2014. Uploaded on June 15, 2010. Published by the Texas State Historical Association.

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