More accustomed to boardrooms instead of punching cows, Amon Carter, “Mr. Fort Worth,” was often seen in public in a business suit and his trademark Shady Oak Stetson, which he presented to hundreds of dignitaries when they visited. A Kilgore Rangerette drill team’s white felt hat with white leather chin strap is in the Smithsonian Museum. Houston Oiler NFL Coach Bum Phillips sported his outsized Stetson at away games, as did his renegade players when they patronized Gilley’s honky-tonk of the movie Urban Cowboy fame. However, Phillips eschewed his hat for home games in the Astrodome because his “mama” taught him not to wear one indoors.

The 2015 Legislature’s resolution canonizing the cowboy hat traced its lineage: “broad-brimmed hats with high crowns” worn by 13^th century Mongolian horsemen, Spanish headwear of the 15^th and 16^th centuries and sombreros donned later by vaqueros in Spanish Mexico, all precursors to “the emergence of the cowboy in the southwestern United States in the 19^th century.”  Form, not fashion, dictated its function, the resolution noted: “The wide brim provided the face, neck and shoulders of the wearer shade from the sun and cover from the rain while enduring the elements on a ranch or cattle drive.”

The son of a New Jersey hatmaker, John B. Stetson was inspired during an 1860s trip to Colorado’s Pikes Peak to design a hat to protect him from the weather, which he began to manufacture in his Philadelphia headquarters. Production moved to Missouri and finally to Texas, where Stetsons are fabricated at Hatco Inc. in Garland. Hatco also mass-produces another huge U.S. brand of cowboy hats, Resistol, worn by Texas Highway Patrol officers. Resistol moved from Dallas to Garland in 1938.

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