A Boot Collector Feature
A bootmaker built inside a small-town bank that Bonnie and Clyde are said to have tried to rob first — and never left, even after governors and private jets started showing up.
Ponder Boot Company was founded around 1979 by Paul McCoy in Ponder, Texas, a small town north of Fort Worth. The shop set up inside a red-brick building that had once been the town bank — locally said to be the first bank Bonnie and Clyde ever tried to rob, unsuccessfully, years before their better-known crime spree. Within five years, a shop with no advertising budget and a name tied to a town most people couldn't find on a map had built a client list of Texas politicians, local millionaires, and celebrities, some of whom flew into a nearby airstrip to be fitted in person.
In 1986, McCoy expanded into Fort Worth's Stockyards National Historic District, putting Ponder Boot Co. alongside the city's other working bootmakers while keeping the original Ponder location running as well. Decades later, the Stockyards shop remains a fixture of that district, and the brand's reputation for exotic leathers and painstaking custom work has carried it onto more recent rundowns of Texas's essential bootmakers.
Ponder built its name on fully custom, made-to-order construction, with no standing inventory — every pair starts with a conversation about the customer's preferred leathers and details. In the 1980s that meant French calf, alligator, anteater, and ostrich uppers with kangaroo-leather linings, along with a signature touch of single-needle stitching customers' initials directly into the top of the boot. Today the shop is best known for a butterfly-pattern top stitching across the vamp, paired with American-raised ostrich and soft-tanned alligator — a combination distinctive enough that it's become the detail collectors look for to identify a Ponder boot on sight.
Ponder's client list has long included Texas political figures alongside working ranchers and out-of-state visitors flying in specifically for a fitting. A custom pair made for Texas Governor Mark White was on display in the shop in the mid-1980s, and the shop's owners have described a steady stream of "politicians, local millionaires and celebrities" over the decades since.
Ponder still builds every pair to order, out of the same bank building where it started — no standing inventory, no two customers' boots quite alike.
Their own site is in progress at ponderbootcompany.comPairs from smaller, custom, or long-closed makers rarely come up for sale, so this search may not find anything. It’s worth checking back now and then.