North Texas Society of History & Culture

In 2010, Tales 'n' Trails Museum opened its doors after 15 years of fund raising, proving to a somewhat skeptical populace that we would have a first class museum. Through primarily local donations, we have an amazing stone building, a large barn for our Agriculture exhibits, and an oilfield "pumpers' house telling the stories of five main focus areas: the Leather Industry (we are home to Nocona and Justin Boots, the Nokona baseball gloves, Dell Motley religious leather art, and many other leather artists), the Oil/Gas Industry, Agriculture, Western Heritage (we are only a few miles from Red River Station, where cowboys crossed the Red River into Indian Territory to go up the Chisholm Trail) and we have one of the finest Native American artifact collections in the US (The Joe Benton Collection). We are constantly expanding our stories and seeing more and more visitors. We also offer genealogy research to the public with a collection of thousands of county obituaries dating back to the early 1900's, county cemetery listings, telephone books back to 1936, county history books, and help with ancestry.com. Anyone interested in researching the art of boot making can utilize our library of DVDs, books, and tools for the trade. Members are permitted to check out books from our Texana library. We also have hundreds of historic books (many first additions) from the Joe Benton Collection being scanned for public use. We are ADA accessible and offer the use of a wheel chair and stroller to our visitors. We just finished our McCall Family "West Wing" permanent exhibit, a $140,000 project (not counting most of our labor was volunteers) that includes an animatronic version of "Miss Enid" Justin, the Lady Bootmaker, telling the story of Nocona Boots in her own voice! We are blessed to have many loyal, passionate volunteers. We are a visitor's center for our area. Our conference room hosts meetings, programs, and classes of all kinds. We have retired teachers on our board making preparations to better serve our schools in teaching our local history as well as offering a history mystery camp every summer.

Our Needs

We have finished our West Wing permanent exhibits that were our focus last year, so now on to our Agricultural permanent exhibits in our 9000 square foot barn! Our first exhibit will be for the Mose Johnson Poultry Ranch that was located in Bowie, Texas, another Montague County town 20 miles south of Nocona. In 1905, Mose and Mabel Johnson started out with five single comb white Leghorn hens and one rooster. The ranch's large incubator led to international shipment of day old chicks, and by 1915, the ranch covered 350 acres and was considered one of the largest enterprises of its kind. The Johnson's beautiful 1924 home was advertised as "the house that white leghorns built." The business continued to expand in Bowie and Wichita Falls before closing in 1974. We are excited to have access to many artifacts from the Johnson grandchildren that include many photographs, catalogs, cages, nesting boxes, etc from the ranch and one corner of our barn is dedicated to this exhibit. Since it was in Bowie, we also hope to use this exhibit to get more people from the south part of our county interested in this endeavor, for it is not just a "Nocona" museum. We will also be working on our "truck farm" exhibit in another corner of the barn which will feature a running Model T pickup and a fruit stand expanding on the importance of farmers to our daily lives. It will also have a vintage stove and displays teaching how fruits and vegetables were preserved. We will need money to build displays for these exhibits, light them properly, labeling, and general preservation needs. We will also need to add security cameras inside and outside the building.