After 50 years, a family-owned Delaware furniture store has announced it’s going out of business.
The hulking Furniture Barn at 791 S. Dupont Highway near New Castle, owned and operated for five decades by the Barnes family, will liquidate its wares beginning Halloween Thursday, the store announced this week.
Furniture Barn, a bit of a disguised play on words, was opened by former General Motors employee and lifelong car lover David Barnes and his family in 1974. Barnes, who died in 2016, began the business with little more than a “pickup and a dream,” according to the store’s website.
Furniture Barn grew to hold a massive inventory of home goods in its 20,000-square-foot showroom, now sandwiched between a split-rail fence store and a bait and tackle shop.
After Barnes’ passing, his family kept ownership of the store and it ran as it always did, said general manager David Everett, who has been with the store 33 years and has run the store’s day-to-day operations since David Barnes’ passing.