Nokona Counts 100 Years as a Company; Its First Baseball Glove Came in 1934

By GvilleTX Newsroom

A 100th-anniversary celebration at the Nokona ball glove factory in Nocona was advertised for Saturday, July 18, 2026, in an event post from Visit Nocona that billed the gathering as the Nokona Ball Glove Factory 100th Celebration. Nokona's published company history dates the business to 1926, which makes 2026 its centennial year.

The factory sits in northern Montague County, according to the City of Nocona, so the anniversary falls outside Cooke County and belongs to North Texas manufacturing rather than to Gainesville or Cooke County proper. Nokona says it kept glove production in Texas through the 1960s and 1970s, the decades when most American glove makers shifted their work overseas.

The round number attaches to the company, not to the glove. In its centennial announcement, Nokona says the business spent its first eight years making leather wallets and purses and did not produce a baseball glove until 1934. Heritage tourism records kept by the Texas Historical Commission give the same 1934 date for the designed and handcrafted premium ball gloves the company makes in Nocona. Both accounts put eight years between the founding and the first glove, so a claim of a full century of glove making does not match what Nokona and the state directory report.

Nokona lists its plant at 917 E. Hwy 82 in Nocona and runs tours there. The company's factory tour page says visitors can watch the stages a glove passes through on the shop floor, among them leather selection, cutting, stamping, embroidery, forming, stitching and lacing. The tour program is listed as ongoing on the company's website at that address.

Nokona also says it held a government contract during World War II to make ball gloves for U.S. military personnel. That statement, like the company's account of the offshoring years, comes from Nokona's own telling of its history rather than from an independent record, and no outside documentation of either claim was available.

Several details about Saturday remain outside the public record. Neither Nokona nor Visit Nocona has published an attendance figure, a program for the day, or a schedule of anything following it, and no official statement about the celebration was available. The only public notice of the date located for this report is the Visit Nocona event post, which advertised the gathering in advance and did not describe what took place.

The two dates that anchor the anniversary are the ones the company and the Texas Historical Commission agree on: 1926 for the founding of the leather goods shop, and 1934 for the first ball glove to come out of it.