Betsytowne Shopping Center on Highway 19E in Elizabethton is continuing to grow, and soon, it will welcome a major new retail store.

Gary Vinson, market development specialist with Farmers Home Furniture, has confirmed to the Elizabethton Star that the company plans to open a 20,000+ square foot furniture store here later this year, in the space formerly occupied by White’s IGA grocery store.

“We’re still a few months away, and the build-out hasn’t started, but we will get started sometime shortly,” Vinson said. “We will be opening up later in the year, hopefully August or September.”

Vinson says he is excited about opening a Farmers Home Furniture in Elizabethton, saying the town has “good demographics.”

“The market looks good to us,” he added. “I think we’ll be a benefit to the community, and we like being part of the community.”

The 100% employee-owned company will feature a full line of furniture and accessories, electronics and appliances, Vinson says — “good quality at a good price.”

The store plans to hire locally, creating about ten new jobs for the area.

According to the Farmers Home Furniture website, the company was founded by Sherwin Glass in 1949 as a hometown store in Soperton, Georgia. It is touted as “one of the fastest growing furniture retailers,” and has 236 locations throughout the Southeast in the states of Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee. It is also listed as one of the top 100 furniture companies in the U.S. and one of the largest privately owned companies based in Georgia.

Farmers Home Furniture has two other nearby locations in Greeneville and Kingsport.

Elizabethton Director of Planning and Economic Development Jon Hartman is also excited about having Farmers Home Furniture as part of the Elizabethton business community and the growth and development he is seeing at the 19E location.

“We have been working closely with the shopping center’s developer, Marathon Realty Corporation,” he said. “When they mentioned the possibility of bringing in a furniture store, we thought it was a great idea. So we sent them our statistical information and the next thing we knew, a deal was in the works.”

Farmers Home Furniture will join recently-reopened seafood eatery, The Mayflower, and Little Caesars in the main shopping strip. Other nearby businesses, located in the former Big Lots building, include a new Farm Bureau Insurance office opened in March by Andy Scott. He will soon have a new neighbor in the building — the Tennessee Department of Motor Vehicles. An Arby’s restaurant is also located at the center.

“We’re glad Elizabethton is continuing to grow and attract new retail businesses and we are certainly excited to see the continued development of the once-vacant shopping center on 19E,” Hartman said.

Betsytowne Shopping Center and over eight acres of land at the facility is owned by Abingdon, Virginia-based Marathon who purchased the property for roughly $1.3 million from SAND, LLC of Elizabethton.