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to Fort Worth, daughter Enid felt so strongly that her father would want the business to remain where it was that she stayed behind and started Nocona Boots there. In 1981, Nocona Boots merged with Justin Industries, parent company of Justin Boots at the time, bringing the bootmaking histories of the two family companies full circle. The Nocona plant was shut down in 1999 and production was moved to El Paso. But the Nocona boot story doesn’t end there. A repurposing success is in the making in Nocona, where once again fans can shop for Nocona boots at the Old Nocona Boot Factory. In September 2016, Leigha Morgan and husband Craig Carter bought the 106,000-squarefoot manufacturing facility and in February 2017 opened a retail store that sells the eponymous brand. Other plans for the rest of the space include a non-profit food bank, community center, auction facility, coffee shop and microbrewery. Boots on the ground If travelers want to see boots being created — especially by hand — their best bet is to visit a small, local boot shop. Some Texas bootmakers’ benches date back more than a century, and a new generation of artisans — having apprenticed with the older masters — are making their mark in a mere decade or two. They often set up their original shops where the customers were. In Amarillo, for instance, lore has it that cowboys driving cattle to the stockyards in Kansas would stop over on the way back home to Texas and buy a new pair of boots for the next year’s work. “By 1930, there were at least 30 bootmakers in Amarillo, primarily on 5th Avenue west of downtown,” says Michael Grauer of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon. “Initially the bootmaker would drive a buggy out to the ranches to trace and measure cowboys’ feet. Later, as Amarillo’s bootmaking capacity increased, cowboys could come into town and have their feet traced and measured for custom-made boots because off-the-shelf boots weren’t available until the 1950s. Most cowboys could afford only one pair of boots — and when a boot needed repair they’d bring it to their bootmaker and sit outside the shop on a bench in their sock feet smoking cigarettes and telling stories and lies. On Saturdays, sometimes there would be a dozen cowboys sitting just like this outside the boot shops.”
ALL IN THE FAMILY: High school student (and budding photographer) Hailey (left) represents the new generation of Ross bootmakers, learning from her father, Charles (center), and uncle, Bob (right).
Western Leather Craft Boot Co. Amarillo One of those was Western Leather Craft of Amarillo, where since 1919 someone with the surname of Ross has made custom boots. D.V. Ross’s original shop was located at 16th and Polk, in the city’s northern retail row. Nearby on 16th, says grandson Bob Ross, rancher and oilman Don Harrington was known to entertain
luminaries on occasion. One day Clark Gable strolled over to the Ross shop to be fitted for a pair of boots. A crowd of camera-wielding onlookers soon gathered. One woman noted the physical likeness of the dark-haired Ross to the famous actor. “But he’s better looking,” she said of the bootmaker. D.V. Ross’ grandson, Charles Ross, younger than his brother Bob by some 17 years, can slide a volume from the numbered stack and find, in its index, the outline tracing of a customer’s foot — along with precise measurements, and a description and price of the pair purchased that time. These days, a fifth generation of Rosses carries on the bootmaking tradition. Charles’ daughter Hailey, a student at Tascosa High, is learning the trade. “It’s a craft,” Bob notes, “that takes patience to learn and time to perfect.” He once calculated that a single pair might require 30 to 40 hours — partly because the leather, at each stage, must be worked wet and allowed to dry. “There’s two ways you can go to hell in the boot business,” he says. “And one of ’em is to work dry leather.” (He never revealed the second.) James Leddy Boots Abilene Abilene, too, served cowboys on far-flung ranches. At James Leddy Boots on U.S. 83 north of town, current owners Al and Deborah Dos
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