In 1993 the building that holds Factory Antique Mall in Verona, Virginia, was a clothing plant, where union members sewed Chaps and Polo University menswear.
About 40 percent of its work came from one Ralph Lauren contract. In 1994 that contract went to a supplier in Canada, a November closing was set, and 530 union members stood to lose their jobs.
In 1996 the empty floor reopened as an antique mall, split among independent dealers. It kept spreading through the building, and in 2015 officials named it the largest antique mall in the country.
One lost contract once emptied that floor. By October 2026, work had started on a new roof above it.
The Verona sewing floor goes quiet
In August 1993, the union at Greif's clothing plant in Verona, Virginia, called on shoppers to boycott Genesco, the company that owned it.
Genesco had threatened to shut the Verona plant and a second one in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, unless the workers took concessions.
On the Verona floor, members of Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union Local 423 sewed men's clothes, Chaps and Polo University among them, and many of the women at the machines had decades on the job.
The union also brought in consultants from Cornell University to work on the plant's productivity and costs, and the company acknowledged the changes.
But the Ralph Lauren contract, about 40 percent of the plant's business, went to a unionized supplier in Canada.
By September 1994 a November closing was set, with the last incoming work due in late October.
For 530 union members, that meant their jobs were about to go.
The shutdown was one piece of Genesco pulling its garment production together.
By July 1995 Greif's operation was over, and its machinery and inventory had been sold off.
Dealer booths fill the empty floor
In the fall of 1996, the empty garment plant reopened as the Factory Antique Mall, at 50 Lodge Lane in Verona, Virginia, just off Interstate 81 at Exit 227 and about a quarter-mile east of U.S. Route 11.
The plant was a big, low building on one level.
Its founder split the old production floor among independent dealers, some renting booths and others smaller glass showcases, and no department store anchored the place.
Some of those dealers kept to a narrow specialty.
Patton House Antiques was selling Heisey, Cambridge, Fostoria, and Duncan glass there by 2002, while it also traded at other antiques locations around the region.
The mall grew in stages inside the walls of the old plant, taking in more of the building as it went.
By March 2008 about 60,000 square feet of it had become selling floor, where the stock ran to books, tools, quilts, silverware, and old clothing from earlier decades.
Lunch boxes and LaserDiscs down longer aisles
In March 2014 bins of vinyl records, LaserDiscs, 8-track tapes, and loose photographs sat among old telephones and furniture.
Other booths carried pop-culture finds, from Knight Rider and Muppets lunch boxes to Barbie dolls, comics, and Star Trek and Transformers figures.
A Crow Shoot board game turned up among household goods and military collectibles, and a small cafe operated inside.
By then the floor had grown past 90,000 square feet, where about 60,000 had been six years before.
Hundreds of booths lined long aisles that crossed one another across the old plant floor, and the building's windows were grouped at the front.
Not every dealer on the larger floor had started out in Verona.
Stadium Suite, which sold sports memorabilia, had left its location in downtown Harrisonburg and moved into the mall.
Officials name the country's largest antique mall
On August 19, 2015, Augusta County officials gathered at the mall with tourism representatives and the deputy director of the Virginia Film Office.
She and the president of the regional chamber of commerce were photographed outside the building.
They announced that it was the largest antique mall in the United States.
The floor covered about 120,000 square feet by then, 10 times the mall's opening size, and more than 225 dealers held space on it.
The comparison was with an antique store in Ohio, which came in about 5,000 square feet smaller.
Patton House Antiques, the glass dealer, was still among those dealers that year.
Film and television productions had already been shopping on the floor.
The film "Lincoln," which took the Oscar for production design in 2013, used objects from the mall.
AMC's Revolutionary War series "Turn" used antiques from the booths, and the PBS Civil War drama "Mercy Street" drew props from the mall before it premiered in the winter of 2015-16.
Open houses, a cafe, and dealers on the move
On December 2, 2018, the mall held its eighth annual Christmas Open House and Customer Appreciation Day, from 1 to 5 in the afternoon.
Another was advertised for December 6, 2020.
In 2021 and 2022 the mall added appraisal programs under the name What's It Worth, with guests that included a vintage-toy specialist in March 2021.
Food stayed on the floor through the spring of 2020.
While COVID-19 rules limited restaurants that March and April, Tasty Bites was serving from inside the mall with pickup and Grubhub delivery, and by June 2022 it was also selling homemade candy and fudge.
In December 2022 the mall announced it was expanding again.
By 2023 Shoppes at Mauzy was trading from inside it, after the business's original shop at the Old Inn at Mauzy had ended in 2018.
One dealer went the other way.
A seller of records and other music at the mall opened Rhythm and Vinyl, a music shop of its own in Harrisonburg, in May 2025.
A new roof and 18,000 more square feet
A large yellow sign along the roofline reads Antiques & Cafe, and painted lettering on the wall calls the Factory Antique Mall America's Largest.
Inside, dealers sell from numbered booths along the main walkways, past an art gallery, book and record sections, displays of Heisey and Fenton glass, and groupings of furniture, and the shared checkout sits at the front.
The cafe is the Bluebird Cafe & Bakery now, on the interior aisle the mall calls Front Street, with meals to eat in or take out and baked goods to go with them.
Dealers who want a booth are put on a waiting list.
In October 2026 the mall announced that work on a new roof was under way.
The floor that officials measured at about 120,000 square feet in 2015 is under that roof work now, and the mall has promised 18,000 more square feet once it is finished.
Underneath, the dealers keep trading.
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