A Boot Collector Feature
Founded with a $5,000 loan and seven loyal employees by a daughter who refused to follow her family's company out of town — and brought back into that same family's hands fifty-six years later.
Enid Justin started working in her father H.J. "Daddy Joe" Justin's bootshop at age 12, in 1906. After his death in 1918, the family debated moving the growing business to Fort Worth for room to expand. Enid disagreed, believing her father had intended the company to stay in Nocona, Texas — so when her brothers moved the equipment to Fort Worth in 1925, she borrowed $5,000, kept seven employees who stayed loyal to her, and founded her own rival company right there in Nocona, naming it after the town itself.
The timing worked in her favor. The railroad had reached Nocona in 1887, and nearby oil fields brought wildcatters who needed a specific kind of boot: a tough, 16-inch lace-up built to survive the oil patch rather than look good in a parlor. Nocona Boots built its early reputation on exactly that kind of durability.
In 1981, Nocona Boots merged with Justin Industries — the company Enid had broken away from fifty-six years earlier, by then run by the next generation of her own family. Production eventually consolidated in El Paso, Texas, when the original Nocona plant closed in 1999. Today Nocona operates as a division of Justin Brands, itself part of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway.
A founding story that's as much about stubbornness as it is about boots — a one-woman rebellion against her own family that turned into a real, lasting company rather than a short-lived grudge. Functionally, Nocona built its name on rugged, working-grade construction aimed at ranch and oil-field use rather than the dressier end of the Western boot market, an identity that's carried through into its modern lineup.
A company built on one daughter's refusal to leave home — quietly reunited with the family business decades later.