Teaching a New Generation

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Robert Harrell, former executive director of the Albemarle Learning Center in Chowan County, N.C., tours two local students around in a cart pulled by a mule, one of the modes of enjoyable travel often used years ago by many northeast North Carolina farmers and their families. (Photo courtesy of Robert Harrell and the Albemarle Learning Center.)

Bob Harrell is reliving his childhood: literally. The 81-year-old retired minister is doing his best to preserve the horse farming tradition he remembers from his grandfather's peanut operation. The equipment clearly fascinates Bob, but his grandfather - Joseph M. Harrell - is the entry point into his passion for the past.

"He was a very interesting man," Bob says of his grandfather. "He never learned how to read and write, but he was extremely intelligent and creative. He had his own little shop at the farm and did all of his own repair work on the equipment.

"He was also - before the word became popular - an environmentalist. He really believed in conserving the soil. I guess you could also say he was an organic farmer. In the spring, when the herring was running in the Chowan River, he would go down to the river with his mule and cart and haul what we called 'fish awful' - the heads and the guts they cut off the herring before they were processed. He would use that as fertilizer.

"All that made an impression on me. I never forgot the way he lived and the way he farmed," Bob says. "So I think it was just sort of natural, as we moved back here in the late 1970s, that I wanted to do something to perpetuate his memory."

In 1992, Bob established the nonprofit Albemarle Learning Center. As the center's executive director, he educated children on use of horse- and mule-drawn equipment to plant, cultivate, dig and process peanuts, and bale peanut hay. He did the same with old corn and cotton equipment.