The series was created by Earl Hamner Jr. based on his own 1961 semi-autobiographical book Spencer's Mountain and its 1963 film adaptation, drawing on his rural childhood in Schuyler, Virginia.

The Waltons grew out of the standalone TV film The Homecoming: A Christmas Story (1971), which was not originally intended as a series pilot but was commissioned into a full series by CBS due to its high ratings and critical acclaim.

CBS's decision to greenlight the rural-themed Waltons was partly a response to backlash after the network's 1971 'rural purge' that had cancelled most rural-set shows, as well as to congressional hearings on television quality.

Except for the Walton children and Grandma Esther Walton, all the characters from The Homecoming TV film were recast for the subsequent television series, including replacing Patricia Neal, Andrew Duggan and Edgar Bergen as Olivia, John Sr. and Zebulon.

Ralph Waite was initially reluctant to audition for John Walton Sr. because he didn't want to be tied down to a long-running series, but his agent convinced him by saying the show would likely fail after the pilot.

Grandma Esther Walton's storyline of suffering a stroke mirrored the real-life stroke suffered by actress Ellen Corby, and Grandpa Zeb Walton's death on the show reflected the actual death of actor Will Geer in 1978.

The fictional town of Walton's Mountain was built on the back lot of Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, bordering the Los Angeles River, using the Hollywood Hills as a stand-in for the mountain; after the series ended this set was destroyed, and a new house façade had to be built on the old Columbia Ranch's Here Come the Brides set for the reunion movies.

Exterior scenes for the first few seasons were often shot in Frazier Park, about 70 miles north of Los Angeles, with occasional filming also taking place in Franklin Canyon Park in Beverly Hills, while exteriors for The Homecoming were filmed in Teton National Forest near Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

The Homecoming's musical score was composed by Oscar-winning composer Jerry Goldsmith, who also scored several first-season episodes, but producers felt his TV-movie theme was too gentle and asked him to write a new, different theme for the ongoing series.

CBS scheduled The Waltons in a seemingly unwinnable Thursday 8 p.m. timeslot against the popular Flip Wilson Show and The Mod Squad, reportedly expecting it to fail so the network could tell Congress that audiences didn't want family dramas; strong reviews and a full-page newspaper ad campaign helped boost ratings and save the show.

In 1992, President George H. W. Bush cited The Waltons as a model American family in contrast to The Simpsons, prompting The Simpsons to produce a special animated segment responding to the comment during a rerun of the episode 'Stark Raving Dad'.

Lorimar sold the distribution rights of The Waltons to Warner Bros. Television to avoid a potential lawsuit, since Warner owned the film Spencer's Mountain (1963), which shared strong similarities with the series.