Bell’s Seed Store Has Sold Fayetteville Gardeners Their Seed Since 1919. After Stewart Bell Died at 64, His Sons Andrew and Hunter Are Keeping It Open.

Pea seed by the pound, tomato plants in spring, Christmas trees in December. For more than 40 years, Stewart Bell was behind the counter for all of it at Bell’s Seed Store, the downtown Fayetteville, North Carolina, shop his grandfather opened in 1919. He died Oct. 20 at 64, and his sons, Andrew and Hunter, say the store is staying open with them in charge.

The Fayetteville Observer reported that Bell died after suffering a brain aneurysm, according to his family. His death came as a shock to his family, longtime employees and the gardeners and contractors who had shopped with him for decades.

A store that started beside the Old Courthouse

The business has been in the Bell family for its entire history. According to the store’s own history page, William Bell Sr. opened it in 1919 on Gillespie Street, beside the Old Courthouse, and ran it for more than 30 years.

His son, William Bell Jr., came back to the family business in the 1950s and moved it around the corner to 230 E. Russell St., where it still stands. The Observer reported that the move came in 1957 and that the founder’s original shop was a general merchandise store selling hardware, farm supplies and groceries.

Stewart Bell bought the store from his father in 1988, the paper reported. William Bell Jr. died in 2013 at 87. A Distinctly Fayetteville listing for the shop describes it as having served the area’s “lawn and garden needs for over 100 years.”

What gardeners came in for

The shelves changed over the decades, but seed stayed at the heart of it. The Observer’s archive photos show yellow onion seed in 2000, red-leaved kale in 2011, geraniums in 2012 and tomato plants in 2014, along with herbs, flowers, fountains and outdoor decor.

Bell once told the paper that customers still bought seed, just in smaller amounts than in earlier generations, such as 10 or 15 pounds of pea seed or butter bean seed at a time. In the 1990s he expanded into contractor supplies, including erosion control materials for landscaping companies.

He also kept a garden of his own. His obituary from Rogers & Breece Funeral Home says his career was spent helping others care for their yards, and that later in life he traded “brown spots in his grass” for the sound of his grandchildren playing in a backyard pool he set up for them each summer.

Remembered at the counter

Bell was born Jan. 15, 1962, and grew up in Fayetteville. He married Gwen Poole in 1986, and the couple would have marked 40 years of marriage on Nov. 1. Gwen Bell told the Observer he often showed up “with sunflowers or roses or an orchid, just because he could.”

At his Celebration of Life on Oct. 29 at First Baptist Church, the Rev. John Cook described a man who rarely left his post. “He was there nine hours on workdays for over 40 years,” Cook said, according to a CityView NC column by Bill Kirby Jr. “He loved the daily contact with customers and contractors.”

Cook also said Bell “was a great listener, and people felt heard.” After his death, the store’s marquee read “In Memory of Stewart Maxwell Bell 1962-2026,” the column reported.

Among the memorial options his family listed was planting a tree in his memory, a fitting request from the family behind a store that sells Christmas trees every December. Stories of families keeping a loved one’s garden going have a long history on this site, including the Campton Hills spruce that grew from a funeral sapling into Chicago’s Christmas tree.

The fourth generation takes over

Bell had been preparing for this handoff for years. His obituary says he spent his final years getting Andrew and Hunter ready to take over as the fourth generation of family owners.

Andrew Bell, 38, joined the business seven years ago, the Observer reported. Hunter Bell, 32, graduated from UNC Chapel Hill in 2017, worked in sports in Raleigh until 2024 and then came home to the store. On keeping the store going, Hunter told the paper on Oct. 31, “That was the plan already.”

Store manager Jeff Thomson told the Observer he will keep mentoring the brothers, and that Stewart Bell’s top concern was for the business to keep growing. For gardeners in Fayetteville, that means the seed bins on Russell Street are not going anywhere.

This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.

Image: Donald Lee Pardue from Sanford, North Carolina, USA – CC BY 2.0/Wikimedia Commons