A Boot Collector Feature

Texas Traditions

A teenager heard a song about a legendary Austin bootmaker, tracked him down, and spent nine years becoming the man who'd carry the shop forward.

The Story

In 1977, at age 19, Lee Miller heard a song about legendary Austin bootmaker Charlie Dunn and set out to meet him. After attending the boot and saddlemaking program at Oklahoma State University, Miller got a call from Dunn himself and became his apprentice — an opportunity Miller has described as "working with somebody from history," learning firsthand from a fifth-generation bootmaker born in 1898. Miller spent nine years training directly under Dunn before Dunn, at 79, had founded his own shop, Texas Traditions, in 1977. When Dunn retired in 1986 at nearly 90, Miller purchased the shop outright and has run it ever since, keeping Dunn's techniques — including his signature rose inlay — alive. Miller now maintains roughly a four-year waitlist and has made a point of training a new generation of bootmakers himself, including three women apprentices, in a trade that's historically been overwhelmingly male.

"Any bootmaker in Central Texas can make a ranch boot, but not any ranch-bootmaker can make a Central Texas boot."— Lee Miller

What They're Known For

Continuity — a direct, unbroken line of technique running from Charlie Dunn's hands to Lee Miller's to the apprentices Miller is training today, keeping a genuinely old style of Central Texas bootmaking alive rather than letting it end with its most famous practitioner. That teaching has reached beyond Miller's own shop, too — around 2007–2008, Miller taught last-building technique to Mark Candela, who went on to open his own exotic-leather shop near Columbus, and Miller's own four-year apprentice Graham Ebner went on to open an East Austin shop of his own in 2021.