Montague County Texas map
33.68° N · 97.73° W · County seat: Montague · 938 sq mi
Montague County's northern boundary is the Red River, and in the 1870s the herds on the Chisholm Trail crossed it here at Red River Station, in the county's northeastern corner. The cattle are gone but the trail towns are still on the map: Saint Jo with its stone square, Nocona with its leather trade, Bowie where US-81 and US-287 run together.
Centered on the village of Montague. The braided line across the top is the Red River; Oklahoma begins at its south bank.
Where Montague County is
This is the second county west of the Grayson County bend in the Red River, on the northern edge of North Texas. Across the river to the north and northeast are Jefferson and Love counties, Oklahoma. In Texas, Cooke County is east, Wise County south, Jack County southwest and Clay County west.
Wichita Falls is about 47 miles northwest and Denton the same distance southeast — the county sits almost exactly between them on US-82 and US-287. Fort Worth is 68 miles southeast, close enough that Bowie has become a commuter and weekend stop rather than a purely agricultural town. The county is in the 13th congressional district.
It was created out of Cooke County in 1857 and organized the following year, and named for Daniel Montague, a surveyor who laid out much of the district and served as a state senator. The seat kept the name too: Montague is an unincorporated village of a few hundred people with the courthouse and an old jail, several times smaller than Bowie or Nocona.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Bowie | City | 5,437 |
| Nocona | City | 3,040 |
| St. Jo | City | 883 |
| Montague (county seat) | Unincorporated | — |
Only three places in the county are incorporated. Forestburg, Ringgold, Sunset, Bonita and Stoneburg are unincorporated communities with no separate census count.
Roads
- US-287 – the fast diagonal, four lanes from Fort Worth through Decatur and Bowie and on northwest to Wichita Falls and the Panhandle.
- US-81 – runs with US-287 through Bowie, then splits north through Ringgold and crosses the Red River into Oklahoma.
- US-82 – the east–west road across the middle of the county, from Gainesville through Saint Jo, Nocona and Ringgold toward Henrietta.
- SH-59 – north from Bowie to Nocona, the link between the county's two largest towns.
- SH-101 – south from Nocona and Montague toward Bowie and the Wise County line.
Red River Station and the Chisholm Trail
Red River Station was a ford in the northeastern corner of the county, and for a few years in the late 1860s and 1870s it was the crossing where the Chisholm Trail left Texas for the Indian Territory and Kansas railheads. A settlement grew at the ford — saloons, supply stores, a ferry — and then vanished once the railroads reached deeper into Texas and the trail was abandoned. Nothing is left but a marker and the river. Saint Jo, farther south on the trail's line, kept its stone-fronted square, now lined with shops and a winery; Nocona and Bowie both grew where later railroads crossed the trail route.
Leather, gas and water
Nocona has made leather goods since the early twentieth century. Nocona Boot Company was founded there and ran for decades under Enid Justin; Nokona, the baseball-glove maker, still cuts and stitches gloves in the town, one of the last such operations in the United States. The county also sits over gas-bearing rock at the northern end of the Fort Worth Basin, and gas leases have been a steady part of the local economy since the Barnett Shale boom reached these counties.
Standing water is scarce — about 7 square miles in a county of 938. Lake Nocona, on Farmers Creek northeast of Nocona, and Lake Amon G. Carter, on Big Sandy Creek south of Bowie, are the two reservoirs, both built for municipal supply and both used for fishing rather than tourism.