OCALA, FL (352Today.com) – Pamela Thompson already knew the building. She bought it 12 years ago and opened The Event Warehouse, an event-decor rental and bridal shop on the Silver Springs stretch of State Road 40. Two years ago she sold The Event Warehouse, but kept the building. The new owners of that business stayed and kept operating inside it. Earlier this year, they notified her they were relocating, and she had to decide what came next. A lifelong Marion County resident, she still had the walls and the history inside them.
“I started thinking about what I could do with the building,” Thompson said. She and her husband keep a place in Alabama, where antique malls mixed with vintage and home goods are the norm. “I just really fell in love with the mixture and being able to go to one place and have such a variety of things to look at and purchase. So, that was the spark of the idea to do something with the building in Silver Springs.”
Silver Springs Vintage Warehouse opened to the public on Wednesday, September 2, 2026, next to Silver Springs State Park. It was already full a month before they opened. “We were full a month before we opened. So there’s people out there, especially with the economy and everything, that they want to buy and sell, but they don’t want to do [Facebook] marketplace and have people come to their homes, or you know, sell one item, two items, things like that. So, we found that there was a huge market out there for people wanting to be involved in these types of stores.”
The warehouse roster boasts about 67 vendor families, a waitlist of 60-plus vendors anxious to secure a spot, and a store manager, Lainey Little, whom Thompson calls her right hand. “She is my right-hand person. She’s a store manager, much more than a store clerk. She has really pulled this together, and without her, we wouldn’t be open and doing so well.”
According to Thompson, a friends-and-family night on Aug. 30 drew more than 300 people in three hours. On opening morning, the lot was packed by 9:45. At 10, when the store opened, more than 30 people walked in together.
“The community has really supported us,” she said. “People have been there five or six times… They’re all thanking us for opening this in the Silver Springs area to have something on this side of town,” Thompson said.
She wanted the building’s next chapter to work as a business and as a reason to stop in Silver Springs after the park, the motels, and the drive from Daytona, Baseline, or The Villages.
“I’ve lived in Marion County my whole life, and so I wanted to have something that would bring people not only to the store but to Silver Springs,” Thompson said. “We’re all trying to get that area revitalized. When they leave the park, or they’re at the hotel, there’s really no other shopping. We need more local business there.”
Thompson and Little taped boundaries on the floor and let each vendor build their individual booth. “We did not do pre-made booths,” she said. “Everyone came in and had to make their own space, and I think that makes it a lot more unique.” Some put up their own walls. Others used furniture as the edge of the stall. “We get a lot of compliments about how not only clean the store is, but how unique it is.”
Specialties such as vintage glass, Pyrex, Dixie Belle paint, soap, salsa, and jams are capped at two booths. “If there are specific things that they make, like soap or, you know, we have fudge and we have salsa and we have jams, jellies, we just try to do those things that are very unique, and that’s their main item, we limit that to two,” Thompson said. Eclectic antique and vintage merchandise fills the rest of the shop.
Two artists in the building have started hanging Florida-inspired artwork on their wall space, Thompson said, including “really neat older pictures” of the state and a Silver Springs glass-bottom boat painting.
According to Thompson, the day-to-day work with vendors is the whole operation. She and Little collect every sale, remit the sales tax, and pay vendors at the start of the following month. They take offers when a shopper wants a different price, point customers to the booth that has the piece, or to a vendor who can make it, and keep the store open after hours so booths can be restocked.
“None of the vendors have to worry about any of that administrative stuff or sales tax,” Thompson said. “We take care of all of that for them.”
Most of the vendors live nearby, and they treat the warehouse like a shared shop floor instead of a row of competing stalls. They restock, then buy from one another for themselves, not to resell. They film social media reels together and post for each other’s booths. According to Thompson, the house rule from the start is no drama and no talking down about other antique stores in Ocala and Marion County.
“These types of customers, they’re not coming in just to one store,” Thompson said. “They like going to multiple places, multiple antique and vintage places, because they’re all unique.”
Thompson maps the drive as a full-day antique loop from The Villages: up Baseline to Silver Springs Vintage Warehouse and Peaches, down East Silver Springs Boulevard, through downtown Ocala, over to Pine Avenue and the Cracker House, then south toward shops like the Rusty Barn.
“They can do this big circle from The Villages and hit a lot of local places,” she said. “Have lunch, make a day of it, and then go right back down without having to retrace their steps.”
The building has older Silver Springs history. What Thompson has been able to trace is this: the Scudders used it as a home in the 1950s, then ran Scudder’s Galleries there into the early 1990s, then built a later gallery across from Lowe’s.
They are proud to have preserved a walk-in vault. “There’s actually a walk-in vault that we’ve kept over the years. The vault doors are from the 1800s; they looked at 1893 to 1898 is when those were built. So, it’s really cool. Everyone likes that feature in the building,” Thompson said.
The building is older than four-lane State Road 40, and it shows at the curb. Parts of the front sit so close to the sidewalk that the door cannot swing open without blocking it. Thompson is talking with Marion County about the lot next door for a cleaner entrance and more parking, and a Silver Springs Community Redevlopment Agency (CRA) façade award is meant to change what drivers see in the meantime.
The award is a 50-percent reimbursement grant: about $71,000 toward an outside makeover she puts at roughly $170,000. The building stays blue and gets a fresh coat. The left side gets concrete siding, and an awning over the door people use with strollers and wheelchairs. The right side, tight to the sidewalk, gets white columns, new lighting, and new signs. Permits are still in process.
Inside, they already pulled the drop ceilings, painted one original ceiling black, finished the other in pallet wood, swapped fluorescent tubes for LEDs, and installed a wheelchair lift so the upper level and the bathroom stay open to everyone.
“We found so many antique stores did not have air conditioning, were not accessible, and did not have bathrooms available,” Thompson said. “We wanted to have our store available to everyone.”
Pets are allowed if they are leashed, well-behaved, and pet-able.
“I tell them we have a very strict policy, and that we must be able to pet them.”
Thompson expected older shoppers as her target demographic. “I am in my 50s, so I consider myself older,” she said. The crowd that showed up is broader than that. Young families come in with infants looking for a deal and for furniture and housewares built to last. Vintage is popular with that age group too, she said, not only with people who remember the 1980s. Her daughter, in her 20s, has a room in the store, and other vendors in their 20s have booths beside the older dealers.
“We have an eclectic group of vendors,” Thompson said. “We do have our older vendors, but we have a lot of 20-something-year-olds too that have booths, and so it’s a nice mix.”
Behind the main floor is an 1,800-square-foot building with no power, used as storage for 12 years. That is the next life she wants: more booths for the waitlist, bigger furniture, and a workable deal on the side lot for parking.
“We are antique, we are vintage, we are home goods, handmade, and local,” Thompson said. “It is not all one thing. We have a mixture for old and young, and everything in between, and we would just love for everyone to come in and take a look around.”
Silver Springs Vintage Warehouse is at 5361 E. Silver Springs Blvd. in Silver Springs. Hours are Wednesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Saturday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.; and Sunday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
To learn more, visit their Facebook page.