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Dresden hopes to keep Longaberger legacy, innovate for future

Bradley W. Parks

DRESDEN – A crowd of dandelion heads has formed outside the Longaberger Homestead where the grass hasn't been mowed for days. The parking lot sat mostly empty on Tuesday.

Rewind to the early 2000s when the Longaberger Co. arguably reached its peak popularity and the Homestead saw about as many people then as it does dandelions now.

Elaine Zimmermann, who has worked at the Homestead for 16 years, said she remembers seeing hundreds of tour buses come to the property every day.

"It was very exciting to work here then," Zimmermann said. "To me, it's still exciting to work here because we still get guests who know absolutely nothing about us."

Zimmermann said it is sad to see the sharp downturn of the company in recent years, but she has high hopes for the future.

And that future is in new hands.

STORY: Tami Longaberger resigns as company CEO

Tami Longaberger resigned as manager and CEO of the company, a position she has held since 1999, giving the reins to John Rochon Jr. Rochon was the vice chairman of CVSL, the company that purchased Longaberger in 2013.

Dresden residents maintain that Longaberger's struggles will not hold the community down. The question is how long Dresden can run off the Longaberger legacy to continue drawing visitors before the baskets lose their appeal.

Dresden lived off Longaberger for years. Main Street now has maybe a fifth of the stores left purveying Longaberger products than it did a decade ago.

Steve Wilson, president of the Dresden Community Association and owner of Weavers' Square downtown, said surviving Longaberger's decline is about adaptation.

"There's this kind of mixed bag of, 'Gee, Longaberger is down and out and we're down and out,' " Wilson said. "Then there's the other side that says, 'OK, we're standing up now and we've dusted ourselves off and we're going back.' "

Wilson will announce two more businesses in the next week for Weavers' Square and wants to attract more events and entertainment. Wilson said he wants Dresden to be about more than just baskets.

But the baskets still pull people to the area.

Cindy Ator drove the nearly seven hours to Dresden on Tuesday from Scranton, Pennsylvania, and has every year since the mid-1980s. She said seeing the basket business decline has been "very depressing and sad," but she thinks Longaberger's former popularity can keep people flowing into town.

"Even if you couldn't afford a basket, you did, no matter what you had," Ator said. "It was like, 'Oh, I have to have one.' "

The baskets still sell too, said Geoff Snyder, a top seller of Longaberger products and owner of The Basket Guy in Dresden. Snyder said people still want Longaberger products. He sold 100 of this year's Longaberger Easter baskets — 10 of them in the shop and 90 online, reflective of the adaptation needed to keep the business alive.

Snyder said he now ships Longaberger products all across the country by selling them on eBay, which helps him as a business owner but not Dresden as a community.

"We don't see it here," Snyder said. "We're almost immune to it. It's like living in Tallahassee, Florida, and never going to Disneyland, I guess. But we just don't see it. All we hear is the numbers, and the numbers are ugly."

In 2000, Longaberger employed 8,200 people. Now, that number is less than 300. In its Newark corporate office, the number of Longaberger employees has gone from more than 500 to 68.

The employees and the money Longaberger brought to Dresden and the surrounding area are dwindling, as is the memory of Dave Longaberger and his company themselves.

Allen Rothenberg owns and operates the Inn at Dresden, a bed-and-breakfast run out of Dave Longaberger's mansion on Ames Drive. He said many visitors, especially young ones, come to the inn with no idea what Longaberger is.

Rothenberg sees part of his duty as preserving Longaberger's vision, while still innovating to help draw new people to the village.

"It's a thin line that you walk," Rothenberg said. "We're trying to maintain the legacy that (Dave Longaberger) has here but, at the same time, not get stuck in it."

Zimmermann, the woman working the counter at Homestead, said holding onto Longaberger and its history is important for the Dresden community. She doesn't want residents to give up on the company.

"They still need us," she said, her voice echoing off the great, empty lobby walls. "And we still need them."

bparks2@gannett.com

740-868-3732

Twitter: @Bradley_W_Parks