Restoring a Village.

• Author: Wilson, Lanna J.
• Position: Nancy Long of Gardner Village and Country Furniture and Gifts - Brief Article

In 1979, Nancy Long thought she was buying a run-down flourmill in the West Jordan area to renovate into a home. But it didn't take long for the divorced mother with six children to realize that with her retail experience and entrepreneurial flare, she could turn the 1877 Archibald Gardner gristmill into a furniture and gift shop. With interest rates hovering well above 20 percent at the time, friends and family said she was crazy when she took out a $60,000 bank loan to help launch the new business. But despite limited funds for overhead, building renovation and merchandise, Long transformed the Gardner mill into Country Furniture and Gifts, opening doors for business in 1980. In 1990, she and her second husband, Chris Christensen, opened the immediately successful Archibald's Restaurant in another part of the mill.

Since then, Long and her family have worked tirelessly to relocate other donated historical buildings to the West Jordan site, recreating a seven-acre village where the once bustling 1850s pioneer community of the Archibald Gardner family lived. Today, Gardner Village has earned its place on the National Register of Historic Places and is a popular destination for specialty-shop browsers, tourists and bicyclists along the adjacent Jordan River Parkway.

A graduate of the "School of Hard Knocks" as she puts it, Long has experienced more than a few trials. Her first business, an antique and second-hand shop in Tooele, opened in 1970 but went under within its first year. In 1971, when she and her first husband, Joe Long, opened their first unfinished furniture store, the roof was caving in and she didn't have any idea about money matters. (To this day, she claims to be entirely right-brained with no head for figures.)

Her marriage to Long fell apart in the late 1970s and when she launched her next venture, the Black Goose, an upscale furniture store in Salt Lake, no one came to the grand opening -...