House Proud - The Wild West in the Backyard - NYTimes.com

The Wild West in the Backyard

Megan Thompson for The New York Times

Jimmy Helms, right, a retired dentist, has built an Old West town on his Texas ranch, including a schoolhouse. More Photos »

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Dr. Helms keeps adding buildings to his town, which he calls New Dubina. More Photos »

IT’S a rite of passage for many Texans to retire to a home on the range. But unlike other wannabe cowboys, Jimmy Helms, a retired dentist whose patients included former President George H. W. Bush, wasn’t content with just a herd of cattle and a stocked fish pond. He built his own old Western town that recalls the days of lawmen and gunslingers on his 105-acre ranch.

“I guess I watched too many Lone Ranger movies as a kid,” said Dr. Helms, 70, who first thought of building the town in 1982 when his wife, Carol, suggested that he spruce up four decrepit barns on their recently purchased ranch, which was then their weekend getaway from Houston but is now their permanent residence. “I looked at the old barns and I thought, hmmm, maybe I could have me a town.”

Because he was still busy with his dental practice and he didn’t have the money to do it all at once, the town grew incrementally. It took three years just to get the rotted hay out of the barns and another decade or so to put new facades on them and renovate the interiors. He did much of the work himself but had help from a local handyman who built a mockup of the town out of birdhouses to guide them.

After refurbishing the barns, they hauled in some centuries-old buildings from elsewhere on the property and built several new structures to create a town that today is so quintessentially Wild West, Wyatt Earp would feel at home. Dr. Helms calls it New Dubina, in homage to Dubina (pronounced doo-BEE-na), a nearby town destroyed by fire in 1907.

“It’s still not finished,” Dr. Helms said of New Dubina. “A town is never finished.” His next project is to build a two-story Western-style hotel with an interior balcony “like the kind that cowboys fall off of in the movies,” he said.

Black and white Longhorn steer raised on the ranch blink impassively from behind a split-log fence as Dr. Helms, in boots and cowboy hat, strides about his town, which now has 22 buildings. Each is filled withHouse Proud - The Wild West in the Backyard - NYTimes.com