MONMOUTH — Monmouth’s very own Wild West town is for sale.
Complete with a saloon, a general store, a post office, stables, a church and, for any outlaws getting a little too wild, a jail and gallows, Purgatory Ridge is the creation of Don Williams.
Williams moved to Monmouth in 1987 and, between 2000 and 2004, oversaw the construction of a mock Western town on a dirt road just beyond a former farm field next to his Ridge Road home. The home — with 21 rooms spread over three floors and 5 1/2 bathrooms — and the Western-themed town is listed at $1.3 million.
Williams, throughout his life, had a fascination with the Old West. He grew up in the 1950s in New Jersey watching Western movies and programs in black and white.
After first buying the home, which was built in 1880, Williams bought up multiple properties around it to create an estate that is made up of 143 acres. Williams, now 74, was an entrepreneur who bought struggling manufacturing plants up and down the East Coast and built them back up into successful businesses.
They included concrete plants, a sand and stone quarry in Massachusetts, a concrete pipe plant in Leeds he owned until 1988, and Northeast Doran, a heavy metal fabrication business employing some 25 people in Skowhegan, now overseen by his daughter.
But the wooden Western town he built on his Monmouth estate was all about fun.
“It was something my father always wanted,” said Bryan Williams, Don Williams’ son. “It was all his idea. He’s an engineer. He probably enjoyed the construction more than anything. He loved being around construction and work and factories. This was all just fun for him.”
The collection of wood-framed buildings was built by a crew of men working for Williams’ company.
Bryan Williams said those men built the Western village sporadically over a few years.
“When work at his company slowed down, he would find other work for the men, sometimes fixing equipment and sometimes building a Western village,” he said. “His company requires skilled and talented workers that cannot be laid off during slow times and then re-hired when busy. He accepted losing money and would prefer to pay them to build the village instead of collecting unemployment.”
The town is laid out in a specific order.
Going down the rough dirt road into the village, the first building is a livery stable, currently occupied by two muscular draft horses. It’s no coincidence that building, a place for work, is the first in the makeshift town. The next building down is a saloon, complete with an old-timey swinging front door, the kind that, in some Western movies, would swing open with a creaking noise as a white-hatted cowboy strode through it and into the saloon, looking for a black-hatted bad guy at the bar. The saloon has a bar made of wide wooden planks, and wagon-wheel style lighting. Like the other buildings in the village, it is wired with electricity.
Upstairs on the second floor of the saloon building are multiple bedrooms of a brothel.
“He always believed you’ve got to work first,” Bryan Williams said of his father making the working stables the first building. “When you get out of work, then you can go to the saloon.”
Across the street from the saloon is a small outbuilding, dubbed “Blackie’s Hideout,” which actually contains a generator for the mock town, but which, in the Old West theme, was the hideout for those black-hatted bad guys.
One building down from the saloon and brothel is the jail. The jail has two steel-barred cells. Across the road from the jail is a hanging gallows — nonfunctioning.
Once you get out of jail, Bryan Williams said, you have a choice — go left, back to the saloon; or choose to go right, first to a long, shingled building known as the mercantile exchange, which contains a bail bondsman’s office, a post office and a general store, then, at the end of the road, to a white, steepled church full of real pews and an altar.
The property’s caretaker, according to Linda Beaulieu, a Realtor listing the property with Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate/The Masiello Group, had her wedding at the church. The caretaker lives in a ranch home on the Wild West village site.
Don Williams, Bryan Williams said, would take his John Deere Gator utility vehicle down to visit the church every day.
A small pond is down a path behind the church, one of multiple trails on the property.
Williams’ family, including grandchildren, enjoyed the property, and periodically children with disabilities would be invited to come to check out the village.
The main house at 492 Ridge Road, above the Western village, has 21 rooms spread over three floors, 5 1/2 bathrooms, two garages each with occupied apartments above them, an expansive deck looking out onto fields and woods, and large white columns facing the road.
Williams is selling the property because he is no longer healthy enough to take care of it. He lives in Florida with his daughter, Annette Gustin.
Two television stations and a radio station have done stories on the unique property.
Bryan Williams, who lives in New Jersey, said family members are a bit surprised by the interest in it.
“Yeah, he’s an eccentric kind of guy, but we didn’t think anything of it,” he said.
Beaulieu, who has been in real estate for 21 years, said she’s never seen or listed a property like it, though she did once list a castle a Maine man had built himself.
She said the property, despite its uniqueness, hasn’t yet drawn much interest from potential buyers since it was first listed last June.
She said the large main home potentially could be used as a bed-and-breakfast, as a previous owner, years ago, once had at the property.
While the dairy farm across the street, which was once part of the estate, was sold off previously, Beaulieu said Williams wants to sell the rest of the property, including the main house, the ranch home, a mobile home, the complete Western village and the 143 acres it all sits on together as one property.
Keith Edwards — 621-5647
Twitter: @kedwardskj
Send questions/comments to the editors.
