Standard of the West · the Justin Story

There's not much reason to go to Spanish Fort nowadays, unless you're drawn there by its past. Today, it's little more than a ghost town with a handful of residents, a half dozen or so ramshackle, weatherbeaten frame houses, an abandoned schoolhouse and a padlocked general store with a sign proclaiming that the Spanish Fort Coon Hunters Association used to gather there for weekly hunts every Saturday morning. But in 1879, young Joe Justin set up shop in a little one-room frame building and put up a sign that read, H. J. Justin, Boot Maker. The opening of his crude, one-man shop marked Spanish Fort's final brush with history. The trail town would fade into oblivion, but it would be remembered as the original home of the company whose name became synonymous with cowboy boots and a part of western lore. Justin Industries today is a far cry from the one-man boot shop of more than a century ago, but its growth wasn't always an easy trail. This anecdotal and lively history of a family and a business, drawn from interviews with John Justin, Jr., newspaper and magazine articles and company records, traces the company - and its boots - through moves to Nocona and Fort Worth, periods of serious financial difficulties, family legal squabbles, and an unfriendly takeover attempt along the way to its present status as a $500 million enterprise with interests in publishing and building materials. But boots are still the focus - the Justin Boot Company, the Nocona Boot Company, and the Tony Lama Company.