A few years ago, Drew Deimling purchased property in Williamsburg for the sole purpose of staging a monthlong, weekends-only festival devoted to Dodge City and the culture of the Old West.

“We’re very family-oriented,” he said. “I have two children, and there’s only so many times you can take them to the zoo or King’s Island, and they’re still too young, thank God, to be constantly playing sports and video games. I played sports, too, as a kid, but I also played cowboys-and-Indians games, and it just stuck with me.”

Although Deimling ruefully joked that he “mortgaged his life away” in the purchase, he hopes that he’ll continue to be able to provide alternative, constructive entertainment for families. “There’s a lot of debt,” he said. “The long-term plan is to make money doing this, and the short-term plan is to not lose money doing it. This is our fifth year, and we had great attendance last year. Our model was the Renaissance Festival, only we make it more universal, more family-friendly.”

There is a great deal for kids and families to do at the festival. The chief activities for little ones, after being deputized for the day, will be panning for gold and taking train, pony and covered wagon rides. Their parents will enjoy period music, a street cast that claims Rutherford B. Hayes is the president (visitors are invited to come in period dress themselves and enter the costume contest), gunfights in the street, restaurants that sell beer, steakburgers and sarsaparilla, and a trick roping world champion named Rider Kiesner, among other things.

“(Kiesner) does a bit of knife-throwing, too, and he’s pretty sharp, no pun intended,” said Patty Ryan, Deimling’s cousin and a former public-relations professional who has helped him promote the festival since its founding. “There’s something for people of all ages at the festival. There’s nothing like it in Ohio.”

The festival will also feature several themed weekends, one of which is America’s Pastime Weekend, where regional, vintage baseball clubs, including the Cincinnati Red Stockings and the Dayton Clodbusters, will utilize the uniforms and equipment of 1869 and play ball according to the rules of that time, which includes playing bare-handed, underhanded pitching, bans on spitting and cussing, and getting outs by fielding the ball on one bounce.

“With the Reds doing as well as they have, it should be really helpful,” Ryan said.

The gunfights are staged at predetermined times and are performed with genial humor.

“We try to make it fun,” Deimling said. “We use simple plots, like a bank robbery or an argument that goes bad. Blanks are used and we make sure the streets are clear before it happens. It’s a comical version of what you see in the movies.”

However, like many Old West buffs before him, Deimling pointed out that the reality of frontier violence was quite different.

“Most gunfights took place within 4 feet, so they were covered in gunpowder,” he said. “If anyone was shot at a distance, it was more due to luck than skill, not just because of marksmanship but because people didn’t always have the best firearms. We’ve recreated Dodge City down to the names of the buildings, and we specifically chose the period when Texas cowhands were coming up the cattle trail with a lot of money and causing problems. That’s why nobody was allowed to carry guns north of the train tracks.”

Indeed, the festival, despite its partial celebration of the pop-culture myths associated with the Old West, prohibits any actual firearms on the premises, just as parts of the actual Dodge City did 130 years ago.