Drive east out of Frazeysburg on State Route 16 toward Dresden and the giant apple basket still shows up on the right, exactly where it's been since 1999. Most people who pass it these days assume the whole place behind it is the same story: dead, dark, waiting for someone to finally tear it down. For a long stretch of the 2010s, that assumption was mostly right.
It isn't anymore. Somewhere in the last two years, without a ribbon cutting or a headline most people caught, the old Longaberger Homestead complex quietly split into two separate properties with two very different futures. One half is booking weddings this fall. The other half went up for sale for $5.7 million last November, and there's no public record yet of a buyer stepping forward.
One Complex, Now Two Parcels
The Homestead was built along Raiders Road in the Wakatomika Valley between Frazeysburg and Dresden, completed around 1999 near the peak of the Longaberger Company's run as a billion-dollar basket business. At its height it functioned like a self-contained tourist town: a welcome center, a two-story retail building with a museum feel, a working restaurant, and the giant apple basket out front that people drove hours to photograph.
The company's sales had already slid from their billion-dollar peak before it filed for bankruptcy in 2018, and by the time the property came back on the market in November 2025, the buildings had been sitting vacant for about a decade, the exact stretch Tripadvisor reviewers describe in painful detail: potholed lots, peeling wallpaper, boxed inventory sitting untouched in an empty restaurant.
In 2024, the entire property changed hands as a single purchase. What happened next is the part most people driving Route 16 haven't caught up to: the new owners didn't try to revive everything at once. They split it.
Half of It Reopened as a Wedding Venue
The Crawford Barn and the Victorian farmhouse next to it, both part of the original Homestead footprint, were renovated and pulled out as their own operation. That barn has a longer history than most people realize. It started life as a 12,000 square foot barn owned by the Crawford family in Licking County. In 1994 the county's historical society wanted to buy and preserve it but couldn't cover the roughly $700,000 price tag. Later that decade, Dave Longaberger approached Bert Crawford, grandson of the barn's original owner, about buying it outright. Crawford decided to give it to Longaberger instead, on the understanding that he'd keep it standing. In January 1998, crews began taking the barn apart piece by piece to move it to the new Homestead site outside Frazeysburg.
That barn is the part of the complex that's alive today. The Crawford Barn now operates as an event and meeting venue serving the Zanesville and Columbus area, and it's currently booking weddings on the same ground where Dave Longaberger relocated it more than 25 years ago.
The Other Half Is for Sale, and It's Bigger Than the Barn
Everything else, the part most visitors actually remember, is a separate listing now. The remaining 15.2 acres went on the market in November 2025 for $5.7 million through Lepi & Associates, a Zanesville-based commercial brokerage. The listing describes four main buildings on that acreage, plus the giant basket structure and an outdoor plaza that visitors will recognize instantly:
- The original welcome center, roughly 16,000 square feet
- The two-story retail center, about 70,000 square feet, with symmetrical staircases and elevators in the lobby
- Dave Longaberger's original house, still standing on the property
- The old Homestead restaurant
- The giant apple basket, plus the outdoor mini-plaza and brick walkway around it
One of the listing agents, Dan Robison, described the condition of the buildings this way:
"The buildings are in miraculous shape."
That's a notable claim for a property that sat mostly vacant for close to a decade, and it's worth taking at face value only because it comes from someone whose job is to walk buyers through the actual interiors, not from a drive-by review. Whether it sells at $5.7 million, sells for less, or sits another year is genuinely open. What's already settled is that the Crawford Barn and Victorian farmhouse are no longer part of that conversation. They were carved out, fixed up, and put back to work before the rest of the property went back on the market.
Don't Confuse This With the Basket in Newark
If you've read anything else about Longaberger's real estate situation this year, there's a decent chance you saw a mention of the seven-story basket-shaped headquarters building in Newark, the one built to resemble the company's medium market basket. That's a different building entirely, sitting on a different piece of land about twenty minutes away, and it went through its own sale listing in 2026 at $8.5 million, with a condition attached that the new owner keep it looking like a basket. National coverage sometimes blends the two properties together because they share a name and a founder. Locally, they've always been two distinct places with two distinct fates, and right now their timelines happen to be running in parallel.
What This Actually Tells You About Frazeysburg
None of this changes anything about where the village line runs or what the schools look like. What it does change is the answer to a question a lot of longtime Muskingum County residents have been asking without much hope of a real update: is anything ever going to happen with that place?
Something already has. Not the sweeping full-property revival some people probably pictured, and not the total teardown others assumed was inevitable. Instead, the property split along a practical line, the smaller and more manageable piece got fixed first, and the larger piece with the more recognizable landmark is sitting in front of buyers right now, priced and ready to be evaluated on its own terms.
That's a more interesting story than "it's abandoned" or "it's coming back," and it's the version that's actually true as of this fall. If the $5.7 million half eventually finds a buyer, this stretch of Raiders Road could look different again within a couple of years. If it sits on the market longer, the split itself becomes the long-term state of the property: one working venue, one landmark still waiting.
Either way, it's the kind of local detail that doesn't show up on a real estate portal search, and it's exactly the kind of thing worth knowing if you've lived near that giant basket long enough to have stopped really seeing it.
If you're curious about anything else quietly shifting in Frazeysburg, Dresden, or the rest of Muskingum County, that's the everyday work of paying attention to a place, not just its listings. J Moore Realty Group keeps a close eye on these towns because we live and work in them, so when you're ready for more than curiosity, we're already up to speed.
