MONTAGUE COUNTY is in north central Texas on the Oklahoma border. The county seat, also named Montague, is 100 miles northwest of Dallas.

Organization of the area occurred twenty years after the Texas Revolution of 1836. The State Legislature established the county on Christmas Eve in 1857. The new county was named for Daniel Montague, surveyor of the Fannin Land District and veteran of the Mexican War. Only three villages existed in the county at the time, and none of them was near the geographic center of the county. So an uninhabited area at the appropriate location was identified as the county seat and also named in honor of Daniel Montague.

At the time the area of Montague County had less than 1,000 residents. A slight majority of these inhabitants had immigrated from the upper South, primarily Tennessee but also from Kentucky and Arkansas. A substantial number arrived from north of the Mason- Dixon line, mostly farmers from Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. As a result of this immigration pattern, the county did not reproduce the slaveholding plantation society that characterized the state. This in part explains the position Montague County took when voters rejected secession 86 to 50 in 1861. The 849 residents, including thirty-four slaves, may have been more concerned with preserving their lives than the union. If Texas joined the Confederacy, federal troops would withdraw from the Red River area. Government soldiers provided the only protection from Indian raids, and their removal would leave the underpopulated county exposed to attacks from Indians who far outnumbered them. The next 15 years confirmed their fears, as Indian raids forced farmers to abandon their homes. The end of the Civil War did not resolve the problem. Bands of Comanche and Wichita Indians continued to harass the county until the mid-1870s. As a result of these raids, in 1870 only 890 residents had settled in the county. During the first few years of the 1870s, however, an organized effort successfully drove the Indians from the county, allowing the governor in 1878 to pronounce that Montague County was no longer a frontier county. As the number of Indian raids decreased, the number of settlers increased. By the early 1880s the population was 11,000. The abundance of grasslands had attracted cattlemen as early as the late 1860s. In the fall of 1867 Montague County was the last Texas county crossed by the Chisholm Trail before it entered Indian Territory. For the next 25 years county residents concentrated their efforts on cattle raising, as a result farms produced forage for livestock and food rather than cultivating a cash crop.

The emergence of large cattle ranches and the continued increase in population attracted railroads to the county in the early 1880s. Ironically, the one community that was not touched by the tracks of the three rail systems was the county seat. As a result, Montague was soon overshadowed by Nocona, home of the Justin Cowboy Boot Company, to the north; Saint Jo, an important farm market center, to the east; and by Bowie to the south. Bowie’s growth and development as an agribusiness center prompted a call by the town’s residents for the county seat to be changed to their community. An election was held in 1884 and, although Bowie received more votes than Montague, it did not collect the required two-thirds majority needed to move the county seat. Since the mid 1880s, however, Bowie has remained both the largest and most important town in the county, while Montague’s population has never exceeded 500.

What attracted the railroads to the county was cattle, but in the 1890s the cattle herds that crossed Montague County disappeared, replaced by fields of cotton. The cash crop proved so popular among farmers that the number of acres devoted to cotton increased from just under 11,000 in 1880 to well over 78,000 in 1900. Following the decline of cotton, farmers turned to truck farming, planting watermelons, tomatoes and potatoes. In 1980 they led the state in the production of apples and were sixth for peaches. At one time the county boasted of being the home of the world’s largest chicken ranch, when the Johnson ranch at Bowie covered 350 acres and housed a 250,000 egg incubator.

The decade of the 1930s also saw Montague County return to its original economic venture, cattle ranching. The number of cattle increased from 30,000 in 1920 to 40,000 by the mid-1930s. Oil was discovered in the county in 1919, and by the 1930s petroleum and natural gas production was making a significant contribution to the local economy.

(The information above is excerpted from the Handbook of Texas, an encyclopedia published by the Texas State Historical Association. The Handbook can be accessed on-line at http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/ online/index.new.html. Copies of the two-volume set may be obtained by contacting the history organization at 512-232-1513.)