Carman Allen · History

History

Carman Allen was a custom bootmaker at 8616 Quebec Drive in Fort Worth, Texas, profiled in Joe Nick Patoski's June 2002 Texas Monthly roundup. He had formerly been a bull rider and chap designer before shifting to boots. His specialties were detailed tooling and a trademark lightning bolt, priced from $650 with an eight-to-ten-month wait, and his clientele came from the cutting-horse crowd.

His own website describes made-to-measure boots built on a last fitted to the customer's foot, with stitched, inlaid, overlaid, or tooled tops, but it does not print a founding year, street address, or the bull-riding background. He is a different person from a Carman Allen credited on a Nashville-area listing, from the Carman Allen described as H. J. Justin's wife in the Handbook of Texas, and from a Dallas-Fort Worth construction executive of the same name.