The Sidewalk Cattlemen

The Madisonville Sidewalk Cattlemen's Association began as a newspaper joke in 1941 and grew into one of the town's longest-running institutions. Henry Fox, editor of the Madisonville Meteor, used his front-page column to mock townspeople who wore cowboy boots without keeping so much as a milk cow, and he called two young lawyers, Ebb Berry Jr. and George Brownlee, "sidewalk cattlemen." The Meteor printed rules and penalties for boot-wearing on March 6, 1941, and the association was organized on March 25, with Dr. Jesse B. Heath as president and Fox as secretary-treasurer. Its rule is that anyone wearing boots inside the city limits must own at least two head of cattle or be dunked in a horse trough on the Madison County Courthouse lawn.

The ducking traces to a Waco paper salesman, Ralph Ritcheson, who called on Fox in boots a few days after the rules appeared. Unable to prove he owned cattle, he was made to buy drinks for everyone within yelling distance and had his boots filled with ice water. Wire services carried the story across the country. A ten-year-old from Cambridge, Massachusetts, Audrey Mangan, wrote to ask where she could buy cowboy boots, and the association flew her to Texas as guest of honor at its first barbecue in April 1941.

After the war it ran a yearly contest, beginning in 1948 with a search for the former soldier who hated Texas most; the winner, Ray Halloran of Cincinnati, was brought to Texas, entertained in Madisonville and taken on a tour of the state. A 2017 Texas House resolution marking the association's 75th anniversary credited it with hundreds of thousands of dollars in scholarships for area students.