The Founders:
From Makeshift Workshops to Leather Dynasties

Justin: The Boot Born on the Chisholm Trail

In 1877, at eighteen, Herman Joseph Justin (born on April 7, 1859, in Lafayette, Indiana, and later known as "Daddy Joe") left his hometown to apprentice as a bootmaker in Gainesville, Texas. Two years later he settled at Spanish Fort, Texas, right on the Chisholm Trail that the herds followed north toward Kansas. He began by repairing boots in the back room of a barbershop, before persuading the barber, Frank See, to lend him $35 (about $1,140 in 2026) to launch his own business. See bought the first pair Justin ever made, and would wear it for more than twenty-five years.

The family business owed a great deal to his wife, Annie Justin, whom he married in 1887. Around 1894, she designed a self-measurement kit (a tape measure and an instruction sheet) that let any cowboy take his own measurements and order his boots by mail, wherever he happened to be. Annie did not stop at that commercial innovation: she took a direct hand in designing, cutting, and fitting the boots, working alongside her husband and their seven children. In 1889, when the railroad reached a point a few miles from Spanish Fort, the whole town (Justin included) moved to the new line, giving rise to the town of Nocona, Texas.

Two sons, John and Earl, joined the business in 1908, which became H.J. Justin and Sons. When Daddy Joe died in 1918, his children carried on his work, until a family disagreement in 1925 gave rise to a second house every bit as enduring.

Hyer: From the 1875 Order to the Olathe Dynasty

The story of the 1875 order placed with the bootmaker Charles Hyer of Olathe, Kansas (pointed toe, tall angled heel, scalloped shaft) is the subject of the article Birth of the Modern Cowboy Boot. That local success prompted Charles and his brother Edward to found the Hyer Boot Company in 1880. The house shod the region's cowboys as readily as more famous figures: Buffalo Bill Cody, Tom Mix, and Will Rogers were among its customers. The Hyer family ran the company for nearly a century, until it was sold in 1977 to the Ben Miller Boot Company.

Lucchese: Sicilian Craftsmanship in the Service of the Cavalry

Salvatore "Sam" Lucchese was born in 1868 in Palermo, Sicily, into a family of bootmakers. He emigrated to the United States with his family in 1883 and settled in San Antonio, Texas, where he opened a workshop with his brother Joseph near Fort Sam Houston: a cavalry garrison. Their first clientele would be military before it was civilian. Sam Lucchese stood out for his constant drive to modernize production: by 1919, the shop was turning out thirty-five pairs of custom boots a day.

His arrival was part of a broader wave of migration: while fewer than 200 Italians were recorded in Texas in 1870, there would be more than 8,000 by 1920, carried by community mutual-aid networks in San Antonio. After suffering a stroke in 1923, Sam Lucchese handed the reins to his son Cosimo. The house remained family-run across several generations before being sold, in 1970, to Blue Bell Incorporated: the parent company of Wrangler. Its headquarters would not leave San Antonio for El Paso until 1986.

Tony Lama: From Army Cobbler to El Paso Legend

As with Lucchese a few decades earlier, it was a military post that opened the way. Born in 1887 in Syracuse, New York, to Italian immigrant parents, Tony Lama lost both parents at eleven and learned the bootmaking trade from an uncle. Enlisted as a cobbler in the U.S. Army, he was posted in 1910 to Fort Bliss, Texas, under the command of General John J. Pershing. When his service ended, he settled in El Paso, Texas, and in 1912 opened a shoe-repair shop on East Overland Street. That first year, with a single employee, he made twenty pairs of boots.

Tony Lama married Esther Hernández in 1917; their six children would all, in time, join the family business. Over the decades, the house built a reputation until it became one of the largest boot manufacturers in Texas.

Enid Justin: The Daughter Who Refused to Leave Nocona

In 1925, the Justin family decided to move H.J. Justin and Sons to the big city of Fort Worth, Texas. One of Daddy Joe's daughters, Enid Justin, opposed the move: she had started working in her father's shop at the age of twelve, in 1906, and had drawn her first boot pattern at fourteen, inspired, she would later say, by the design of an embroidered velvet sofa. Rather than follow her family, she chose to stay in Nocona and found her own house there with the few craftspeople who remained.

The Nocona Boot Company opened its doors on September 1, 1925. Her husband, Julius Stelzer, served as its official president, while Enid herself filled every role required (shipping, collections, sales) before taking full command of the company. In that first year she organized the production line into distinct departments herself (cutting, fitting, lasting) giving her young company the kind of structure worthy of an established factory. It was she, too, who designed most of the decorative patterns (on the shafts as on the toes) that would become the brand's visual signature. Known throughout the region as "Miss Enid," she would run the house for fifty-six years, steering it through the Great Depression and then the Second World War, in an industry at the time almost entirely dominated by men.

Rios of Mercedes: The Other Immigration Story

All of these houses bear, in varying degrees, the mark of Italian immigration: Lucchese, Tony Lama. A sixth story, later but with an even older lineage, rounds out the picture: that of the Rios family, whose trade as zapateros (bootmakers) had been passed down from one generation to the next since at least 1853, in General Terán, in the Mexican state of Nuevo León, where the family made boots and saddles for the Mexican army.

It was the Mexican Revolution that pushed the family north: Zeferino Rios emigrated to the United States in 1917 and first settled in San Benito, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley. In 1928, he opened the Rios Boot Company in Raymondville, Texas, with his brother Abraham; the following year, a disagreement between the two men led Zeferino to break away and found his own workshop in Mercedes, Texas, some sixty kilometers (about forty miles) farther south. The town, nicknamed "the Queen of the Valley," became a stronghold of Texas bootmaking in its own right, with as many as a dozen workshops at its peak: a legacy attested today by some thirty boot statues scattered through its streets, in memory of Zeferino Rios.

He retired in the late 1960s. In 1975, a father-and-son pair from West Texas, Joe and Trainor Evans, took over the workshop and ran it for more than forty years. Unlike the five houses before it, Rios of Mercedes would never be absorbed by a large group: it remains, to this day, an independent, family-owned business, one that has since given rise to several sister brands under the name Rios Family of Brands.

Five Destinies, Under One Roof, Almost

At the turn of the 20th century, these first five houses followed diverging paths. The most unexpected reunion came in 1981: John Justin, Daddy Joe's grandson and then head of Justin Industries, bought the controlling stake in the Nocona Boot Company, from his own aunt, Enid Justin, after fifty-six years of independence. Justin Industries then absorbed Tony Lama in 1990, before being itself acquired in 2000 by Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett's group, for $600 million (about $1.1 billion in 2026). Justin, Nocona, and Tony Lama thus found themselves gathered under one corporate roof, renamed Justin Brands.

In 1999, the historic Nocona factory closed its doors, but the Nocona Boots brand did not disappear: its production was moved to El Paso, Texas, where it continues today as a full division of Justin Brands, alongside Justin and Tony Lama. For the group as a whole, consolidation under Berkshire Hathaway brought a gradual offshoring of production: most Justin and Tony Lama boots are now made in Mexico, with only certain lines (notably the Justin Original Workboots) keeping American manufacture.

Hyer, for its part, was sold to the Ben Miller Boot Company in 1977; its production died out soon after. But in 2023, Zach Lawless, the great-great-grandson of C.H. Hyer, revived the brand after eighteen months spent in León, Mexico, learning the trade alongside local craftspeople. The HYER boots are made there today, in Goodyear welt construction: the brand is carried in more than 300 retail locations and is an official sponsor of the American Rodeo and the National High School Rodeo Association. Lucchese took a third road: bought by Blue Bell in 1970, then passed to Arena Brands in 1998, it remains made in El Paso, Texas, where some 200 craftspeople build its boots by hand: Made in Texas, as claimed on its official site. Rios of Mercedes, the only one of the six houses never to have changed owning family, still makes every one of its boots in its Mercedes, Texas, workshop, at a rate of forty to fifty pairs a day: one of the last artisanal boot factories still operating in the United States.