Investor hoped to restore Western town in McKinney that hosted ‘Playboy’ shoots and was a movie set

McKINNEY — It was an eccentric developer’s private fantasyland — a multimillion-dollar replica Western town built from the ground up in the early 1980s on a patch of rural McKinney farmland.

There were tales of Playboy magazine shoots, movie sets, private parties and famous guests. Antique furnishings came from English, Scottish and Irish estates. Building materials were harvested from Texas, the Southwest and beyond.

The town was called Dry Bones, and the farm on which it sits was branded Storybook.

Three owners and two decades later, fresh life is coming to this Collin County outpost, courtesy of South Korean-born investor I.K. Kim.

Kim bought Storybook as a birthday present for his wife more than a year ago, and his family has taken the lead in restoring the property. The farm, or ranch as it is now called, is on the Texas Film Commission’s list of permanent historic movie sets.

“It’s a pretty unique place for Texas and the Southwest in general,” said Brandon Miller, Kim’s son-in-law and a general manager at Storybook. “It feels so primitive here. It’s off the road, in the woods. When you’re actually out here, it feels like you’re in an old Western town.”

It’s still an old Western town, but its surroundings have been dolled up a bit.

To the north is Stonebridge Ranch, one of North Texas’ largest master-planned communities. To the south lies Hank Haney’s golf ranch.

But with suburban growth all around, Storybook has largely withstood change.

Walk east from Custer Road, past the rebuilt Victorian mansion, across Rowlett Creek, and you’ll arrive in Dry Bones — at the town’s only intersection, North Main and Back Street. From there, the town stretches out as it draws visitors into its 15 or so buildings.

There’s the apothecary with original medicines from Eli Lilly, the bank with a century-old walk-in vault from Krum, and the barbershop with a chair brought from Philadelphia.

The chapel’s stained glass hails from the old First Methodist Church in Clarksville, Texas. Its other windows came from the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas.

The history was largely unknown even to the town’s new operators before last week.

That changed Wednesday when they got their first chance to sit down with Jim Miller, the man behind the buildings.

Miller, the retired developer who built Dry Bones over a period of 18 months, spent three hours with the Kims strolling about town and talking to them about his creation.

“I was tickled to death to see it,” he said Friday. “When I saw it a year ago, things were in such ruin. It would have been a shame to see it go on.”

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Western history buffs don’t come much more avid than Miller, who says he spent about $2 million to build his dream.

Before developing Dry Bones in Storybook, he built a Western town in Canton in the 1970s. His current project, just west of Frisco, boasts a larger version of the Dry Bones chapel.

Through the years in McKinney, the developer became friends with a number of Western movie and television stars who shared his appreciation for Dry Bones.

“I guess I was born 100 years too late,” he said. “I was talking with Ken Curtis one time on a set and he said, ‘You know, I’ve been on a lot of sets, but I’ve never seen one in Hollywood with the detail you’ve put in this one.’”

That enthusiasm was shared by folks at Playboy magazine, who in the 1980s photographed a Playmate in an upstairs red bathtub at the Victorian house.

The magazine later returned, Miller said, to shoot another package.

“I agreed to let them do it just to get to watch them,” he said with a laugh.

But all hasn’t been glitz and glam through the years.

Although the name was intended to evoke images from a children’s book, Storybook’s history has at times read more like a financier’s sordid tale.

In 1984, Miller sold the land to a fellow Dallas real estate investor. He got it back in 1986 when the buyer couldn’t turn a profit.

In 1990, the FDIC acquired Storybook when the banks Miller had borrowed from failed and he defaulted on the loans.

An events planner bought the property for $750,000 and kept it until last year, Miller said. Tax problems forced her to sell it to Kim.

“I’m the type of person that doesn’t look back,” Miller said. “I’m proud of everything that I built, especially when someone comes around and appreciates it. But I wouldn’t own it again.”

Jeong Nim Kim, Kim’s wife, said that the day before she first visited Storybook and Dry Bones, she picked up a Bible and turned to the 37th chapter of Ezekiel, which describes the valley of the dry bones.

“The hand of the LORD was upon me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the LORD and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. He asked me, ‘Son of man, can these bones live?’”

The passage turned prophetic the next day, she said, when she fell in love with the property. A South Korean flag now flies alongside those of Texas and the United States near the Victorian mansion.

Lynn Miller, Jeong Nim Kim’s daughter and a Storybook general manager, said the family has ambitious plans to try to draw more tourists, locals, corporations and private events to the ranch.

In December, the facility will open to the public for 12 nights during the Christmas holidays.

“The neighbors for years didn’t know this place was here,” Jeong Nim Kim said. “Now I want to share it with the community.”