BROGDEN William Drake wasn't a cowboy when he left for Hollywood. But when he came back to Johnston County, he brought Tinseltown's Old West with him.

“Wild Bill” is the sheriff of Shadow Hawk, the life-size cowboy town he built in this rural community east of Smithfield.

Born and reared in Kenly, Drake is a cowboy character actor who played in a few episodes of “Bonanza” and “Gunsmoke” and appeared in a number of 1970s-era Westerns.

“Every kid goes to Western movies,” said Drake, a mustachioed man with sharp blue eyes. “You walked out of the theater and you were the hero.”

At 70, Drake has built a whole world to go with his cowboy boots. In Shadow Hawk, real people laugh and drink by electric candlelight. But there are no fights, drugs or riff-raff; it's Wild Bill's town, and he makes the rules.

And for the past few months, Shadow Hawk has been the set for Drake's magnum opus, a feature-length Western that he wrote and directed.

On most weekends, Drake pinned on a sheriff's star, colored his white moustache black and tied his grey hair beneath a dark, silky wig and wide-brimmed black hat. With movie cameras rolling, friends and neighbors walked the town wearing vests, frock coats, suspenders, rumpled dress shirts and the occasional pistol holster.

They all played themselves, thrown back in time with parts Drake wrote for each friend's personality.

“It's like they almost live here in this town,” Drake said. “It's their environment.”

The West back East

Drake charges no admission for Shadow Hawk's visitors, and he's never finished building.

“This thing here's taken hold,” Drake said as he strode through the pseudo-town. “I never planned on this.”

It started with a faux-Wells Fargo bank built from scrap wood. Once he had a bank, he needed a saloon, complete with a bar and poker table.

A decade later, Drake's property is a movie set come to life. Visitors can find a full-sized general store, a jail, a chapel and a brothel over the saloon.

“It's not to get away from anything, 'cause I'm here all the time,” said Drake. The saloon is often filled with cigarette smoke and regulars, their saddled horses tied up on the dusty drag.

“It's almost like walking into a new dimension,” said Robin Johnson, a Brogden local and mother of five who was married in Shadow Hawk's chapel.

Over the years, the place has become a word-of mouth tourist attraction, a shooting locale for commercials and movies, and an old-fashioned hangout for Drake's friends and neighbors.

Robert Deans has been there since the beginning. He stumbled upon Drake's project in 1997, when it wasn't much more than a dressed-up storage shed.

“I said, ‘Heck, I ain't got nothing to do,'” Deans said. So he and Drake set to work. They put up more buildings, each one born of recycled wood crates and hours of manual labor.

And as they built, the people came.

“You can be yourself. You don't gotta worry about nothin',” said James Grady, a tall, bearded man from Garner who has frequented Shadow Hawk for a year.

Teresa Haynes, a new neighbor, said Shadow Hawk and its regulars are a time capsule.

“I wanted to get out of the rat race, move out of the city,” said Haynes, who moved to Brogden from Selma. “I found this place and it was like stepping back in time.”

The man himself

For the people who spend their weekends in Shadow Hawk, or just stop by for a visit, Drake is a commanding presence.

“Here, I'm safe,” said Johnson, who walked down the wedding aisle with Drake by her side. “He looks after everybody.”

Wild Bill is the town's sheriff, mayor and everything in between. He is never without a Marlboro cigarette.

The town is distinctly his, down to its crooked beams and floorboards.

“He doesn't measure very well,” said Benni Drake, his wife and former Hollywood agent. “But that's what's nice, it's not perfect.”

Something about Wild Bill draws people in. For his new movie, “Justice: The Colt 45 Way,” a videographer, sound technician, editor and a cast of a dozen worked for free. No one seemed to give a second thought to donating weekend after weekend.

“It's wild, ain't it?” said Mark Holt, a new neighbor of three months. “He is a legend.”