If you happen to do Rock Ridge, just remember your deputies don't need any stinking badges !!! Seriously, if I were to do it, I would loosely model sections of the SD & IV.
We may not be wild west around here, but the Pennsylvania oil boom hit this region between 1859 and 1870, and the same kind of explosive and fast town construction was typical around here, and the same kind of false-front architecture. People that see photos of it around here immediately think 'old west' when it is very much 'old east'. My office building I'm in was built in 1870 and it could be transplanted anywhere west of the Mississippi and fit right in. One of my truly (model) life changing experiences has been looking at the N scale model of Pithole, PA, the ultimate oil boomtown from the 1860's - on exhibit at the historical museum: https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/16920 Notice the color; feel, weathering...and every window on every building is DRAWN on and looked excellent. It's a first-class model done from photos. You're looking at very basic structures, single pitched roof, with a decorative false front. Except for the bank and maybe a hotel, all wood construction; either board-and-batten or overlap horizontal siding. Usually multi-paned display windows on the front of anything that actually sold anything. By the late 1880's the trend was brick but remember you had to have a railroad to get bricks in. Towns like Flagstaff burned regularly and finally enacted ordinances that banned wooden structures entirely. Depending on how fast the town went up, buildings may or may not have paint, and if they did, it was often simple whitewash. Often either unpainted or whitewash, not really a whole lot else. Real paint came later. Colorado? Nope, Pennsylvania: https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-m...um-centre-pennsylvania-the-town-50024002.html And I agree on the lettering. I still don't know where that came from, probably the movies, I've never seen it on a real structure of the era. And almost entirely dirt streets; true town prosperity was brick streets. Pay attention to weathering - if you've got moisture the unpainted wood will age gray-black, if it's a desert it goes silver-gray.
