Business

The Work We Do: Herb Strobel, Hallockville Museum Farm

My name is Herb Strobel. I’m the executive director here at Hallockville Museum Farm. We are a not-for-profit. We have a mission of reconnecting the community with our shared agricultural and rural heritage. Here at least on the North Fork, and arguably a good part of the East End, we still maintain some of that rural and agricultural character. And so I can’t think of a better place here locally than Hallockville for people to reconnect with that heritage.

I started working here in the early spring of 2008.

There are no particular days here at Hallockville. There’s so many different things going on. In any particular day I’ll be doing anything from dealing with vendors — because we are a small business, and so I’ve got lots of things I’ve got to take care of with respect to what I call vendor relations.

(Credit: Nicole Smith)

I arrive at work usually by 6:15, 6:30 in the morning, check my emails and telephone messages and what-not [and] get paperwork that I need to absolutely get done during the early morning hours [done].

We also do a variety of different events and activities here at Hallockville. One of the ones we do that’s coming up, actually within the next few weeks, is our Hallockville Fall Festival and Craft Show, where we’ll see anywhere from 4,000 to 6,000 people on site on a good weather weekend. As you can imagine, there’s a lot of planning that goes along with that, and so, basically from June through the early part of September a lot of my time is taken up dealing with Fall Festival activities.

We also have a summer camp that we partner with the Peconic Community School out of Aquebogue during July and August. And so that takes up some of my time as well.

So there’s a lot of different things going on at any particular day here at the museum farm.

And actually, that’s one of the attractions of the position, at least for me. It’s not your standard sort of sitting behind the desk and doing the same thing every day or perhaps doing something very repetitive over and over again, day to day to day. It’s a very varied sort of experience that I have here as the administrator of the organization.

Like I tell people, it’s hard for me to imagine a better office to arrive at in the morning and to leave from in the evening.

‘The Work We Do’ is a News-Review multimedia project profiling workers on the North Fork. See more photos on Instagram @riverheadnewsreview.

(Credit: Nicole Smith)