Walker Furniture Company
Gainesville's Oldest Family-Owned Furniture Company
Walker Furniture Company turned 83 years old in 2023. In 1940 Ledger K Walker started what is currently the oldest furniture company serving the Gainesville community. After nearly 80 years of business the company still attributes their success to their founding principles: “take care of all your customers, and they will take care of you” and “if you don’t grow, you grow smaller.”
Walker Furniture has travelled across Gainesville. The original Walker Furniture store was in Downtown Gainesville, and later expanded to a new location on 8th Avenue. Benny L. Walker, the son of Ledger K Walker, took over the business after this move north and by the 1980s the store expanded to four buildings as the third generation of the Walker family entered into the company. The latest expansion occurred in 2008 when the family opened a new showroom at 3413 SW 47th Ave. Walker Furniture is still a reliable and well-known furniture retailer in Gainesville today, and they maintain their founding principles and family-run business model.
The height of the family-owned, local furniture business scene in Gainesville were the decades between 1930 and 1960. Although Cox Furniture and Walker Furniture were two of the longest-lasting and best-known stores, several other brick and mortar warehouses and retail stores also made their mark on the Gainesville community. Other companies that successfully operated at the time were Webb Furniture Co, Hart Furniture Co, and Beasley and Williams.
The present panorama is quite different—very few similar furniture stores remain. Walker Furniture is the oldest furniture and one of the only family-owned local stores existing in Gainesville in 2023. With the University of Florida and the growth of the city by the 2000s, many of the small, local businesses that existed in the 40s and 50s began to disappear. Larger chain companies and retailers that could afford to offer lower prices and larger inventories to Gainesville companies became the places to go. In the age of internet shopping, brick and mortar stores are becoming even rarer, even replacing the retail locations of large national companies. In 2001 IKEA launched its e-commerce platform and in 2002 the online retailer Wayfair launched its services. Still, companies like Walker Furniture have managed to maintain a loyal client base and continue to expand in Gainesville.
