We never left.
Montague County has voted its own conscience since 1861. This is where that tradition came from — and where it goes next.
Montague County was carved out of Cooke County on Christmas Eve, 1857, and named for a surveyor who mapped this country before there were roads to map it by.
The families who filled it came up from Tennessee, Kentucky and Arkansas, and over from Illinois and Indiana. Small farms. Small herds. No plantations. People who owned a little land, worked it themselves, and expected to be left alone while they did it.
That’s who settled here. And for well over a century, that’s who voted Democratic.
Texas put secession to a vote. The state said yes.
Montague County said no.
Understand what that cost. You cast that ballot in your own county, in front of your neighbors, with the whole state stampeding the other direction.
This county has never done a thing just because everybody else was doing it. It thought it over. Then it voted its own conscience.
That’s the oldest thing about us. It’s older than either party’s current mood, and it’s the only tradition on this page we’d ask anybody to keep.
For generation after generation, Montague County backed the Democratic ticket. It wasn’t habit. It was a deal, and the deal got kept.
Democrats ran electric lines down farm roads no private utility would ever have wired. Democrats built the farm-to-market highways that let a man get his crop to a buyer. Democrats passed Social Security, so forty years of work meant something at the end of it. Democrats wrote the GI Bill, and this county’s veterans came home and went to college on it.
And this county didn’t just vote. It sent people.
John Hall Stephens
1847 – 1924
Practiced law right here in Montague. The county sent him to the Texas Senate in 1886, then to Congress — ten straight terms, twenty years — where he chaired the Committee on Indian Affairs. There is a county in Oklahoma named after him.
Sterling Price Strong
1862 – 1936
Came to Montague County as a nine-year-old boy in 1871 and grew up here. Served as county clerk from 1884 to 1888 and again from 1898 to 1904, sat on the State Democratic Executive Committee, and in 1933 took a seat in the Congress that built the New Deal.
Wayne Wagonseller
1921 – 1955
Bowie lawyer. Ninth Infantry Regiment — Bronze Star, Purple Heart. Sent to the Texas House in 1947, moved up to the Senate in 1951. In March 1955 he held the Senate floor for twenty-eight hours and five minutes to kill a bill cutting registration fees for bus companies. He was thirty-four when a car wreck killed him that August.
And the courthouse bench was ours for a hundred years. John P. Humphreys, elected to the Legislature in 1887, buried at Nocona. William T. Russell, twice elected county judge. Thomas L. Walker of Montague, a country lawyer who practiced here twelve years, went to the Texas House, and was dead at forty. Earl Fitts — county attorney, county judge, then Austin.
That’s the bloodline. Local people — not connected people — who went to Austin and made a nuisance of themselves on behalf of the folks back home.
Between 1912 and 1992 — eighty years — only three Republicans ever carried Montague County for president: Herbert Hoover in 1928, and Nixon and Reagan in landslides that took forty-nine states apiece.
Everybody else lost here. This county stayed with Jimmy Carter in 1980 while the rest of the nation went the other way. It was still voting Democratic for president in 1992.
Your parents voted this ticket.
Your grandparents voted this ticket.
A lot of you voted this ticket.
Politics in this state quit being about roads and schools and hospitals, and started being about who you’re supposed to be mad at.
We’d argue the people of Montague County never changed. The politics changed around them. And the people running Austin and Washington today have figured out something useful: an angry voter doesn’t check the receipts.
So check them.
Your property taxes went up while you were told they were coming down. Rural hospitals across Texas locked their doors. In February 2021 the grid failed and Texans froze to death in their own homes, sitting on top of the biggest energy economy on earth — and years later nobody has answered for it and the bill came to you. Right now there’s a hard push in Austin to move public school dollars into private schools, in a county with no private school to move them to.
That’s not a culture war. That’s your school district. Your hospital. Your house. Your money.
We don’t call that conservative. We call it expensive.
Short list. Nothing on it we can’t defend standing in line at the feed store.
Cut what it actually costs to live here.
Taxes, insurance, power, groceries, medicine. The only number that counts is what’s left on the 30th.
Fund the public schools.
Bowie, Nocona, Saint Jo, Forestburg, Montague. Public money, public schools.
Keep a hospital within driving distance.
An ER, an ambulance, a clinic. That’s infrastructure, same as a bridge.
Keep the lights on.
Reliability isn’t liberal or conservative. It’s competent, or it isn’t.
Land and water stay with the people who own them.
Water is the next hundred years up here. The last word on your dirt ought to be yours.
Pay what was earned.
Social Security, Medicare, veterans’ benefits — bought and paid for in payroll deductions and in service. Not a handout. Not a bargaining chip.
Government you can audit.
Publish the budget. Disclose the money. No sweetheart contracts. Nobody getting rich off the office.
Stay out of people’s private business.
Your family’s medical decisions belong to your family. That’s not a liberal idea. That’s the smallest government there is.
Back the folks who build things.
Farms, ranches, small business, the trades. Fair prices, fair competition, and a shot at getting ahead without hiring a lobbyist.
Volunteers. Nobody here draws a paycheck.
Farmers, retirees, veterans, teachers, nurses, shop owners and working parents who live in this county and aren’t going anywhere.
We find and back candidates, register voters, work the polls, and try to make sure every person in Montague County has somebody on that ballot who’ll return their call.
You don’t have to agree with us about everything.
Almost nobody around here fits neatly in either box, and we’re not going to pretend you do.
You can own guns, sit in a pew every Sunday, have voted the other way your entire life, and still want your school funded, your hospital open, your lights on and your officials honest.
If that’s you, pull up a chair. Nobody’s going to ask you to apologize for a thing.
We’re not asking you to turn into somebody else.
We’re asking you to do exactly what this county did in 1861. Look at it square. Count what it’s costing you. Then vote your own conscience.