Heritage association's Farm Fest offers step back in time

On Saturday, June 1, Chowan County residents got to step back in time a hundred years, experiencing what everyday life was like for rural people during the turn of the 20th century.

The world was simpler back then, but it required a skill set that would render most 21st-century people virtually helpless.

Heritage Farm Fest, an annual event held by the Chowan Heritage Association at its center on Morristown Road, allows families to ride in a horse-drawn wagon, watch how a hog carcass is butchered, pet farm animals, see how corn was turned into chicken feed and corn meal, examine old-time collectible tractors, and examine all sorts of antique farm implements.

Joe Goodwin was demonstrating a recently acquired circa 1900 wood-fired stove, the appliance common in rural homes into the first couple of decades of the 20th century. He said that building and maintaining a fire in one is something of an art, but he had a pot of coffee going and planned to demonstrate all kinds of other cooking during the day.

“Everybody’s got a cell phone now,” Goodwin said. “They don’t know how to do anything in the old-time way. I hope we don’t get to a place where we have to go back to this, but they need to do it; need to know it…. The world is changing, and they need to know how their ancestors did things.”