Columnist Susan Snyder: Shop owners are through with Mesquite

Friday, May 24, 2002 | 2:17 a.m.

When owners of the Mesquite Antique Mall close the doors at the end of business today, they will close them forever.

It's not that business isn't good. It's that Mesquite is getting too popular.

And D.C. and Patty Williams say it's not the quality of life they wanted when they settled seven years ago in this town 80 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

"We're moving," D.C. Williams said. "It's too crowded. There were about 5,000 people when we moved here seven years ago."

There are three times that many residents now. Mesquite is no longer a sleepy little weekend getaway for Las Vegas residents. Retirees are passing up burgeoning St. George, Utah, and driving another 40 minutes south on Interstate 15 to build homes in Mesquite.

Farmland has given way to neat rows of tract housing in desert hues. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority is spending $25,000 to figure out whether Mesquite could build and successfully market a conference center as a lower-cost alternative to hosting conventions in Las Vegas.

"This has lost its small-town touch. That's why we're moving to Overton," Patty Williams said.

It's hard for us Las Vegans to imagine that Mesquite could have anything but a small-town touch, seeing as how the entire population could live in one of our planned communities.

There's only one for-real main drag. Heck, they don't have even one Starbucks or a Pottery Barn. How do they survive?

D.C. Williams concedes that his sentiment is a little odd, seeing as how he discovered Mesquite because he worked for a builder.

The couple moved to California from Tennessee a few years ago so that he could work for a construction contractor. They were sent back to Tennessee to build a subdivision, and settled in Mesquite when the job was finished.

They opened the Mesquite Antique Mall with 25 years' accumulation of treasures, acquiring more from dealers, estate sales and the other antique stores as their business and their new hometown grew.

They recently bought Overton's Plaza Hotel along with two commercial lots about a mile away. They intend to build a bed-and-breakfast called the Overton Lodge.

When it opens two years from now, the lodge will feature antiques from the couple's extensive collection, along with the facade of the old Mesquite City Jail, which they bought when it was torn down about two years ago.

Two items that won't be heading to Overton are an 1890s bone-shaker two-wheeler and a child's velocipede from the 1870s.

The rare bicycle predecessors were carted off to Boulder City last weekend by Janean and Tom Gegen, who are re-opening their antique store on the Hoover Dam city's historic district main street.

Patty Williams says she is looking forward living around "farming, country and 4-H" again. The Williamses are aware that people could "discover" Overton like they have Mesquite.

"But we're not concerned," D.C. Williams said. "We're going to eat, work, sleep, live and entertain people there."

People who will go home after a few days. And that makes all the difference.