Ingrid Moses Slaughter lives in the sandy coastal plains of Wilmington, North Carolina, far from the rolling pastures of Craig County where she grew up.
Slaughter was a farm kid, a daughter of Elvin “E.G.” Moses. E.G., a man capable of enduring stress, danger, long hours and hard physical labor, had two hazardous jobs, policing the highways as a state trooper, and raising Angus beef cattle.
Moses bought the farm, on Little Mountain Road in Sinking Creek Valley, in 1969. It included a pole barn, used for storing hay, and a scale house, used to weigh livestock. The buildings date to the 1920s or ’30s.
“Most farmers didn’t have ways to transport their cattle to market,” Slaughter said. “When you’re talking about a herd of 100 cattle, you might be selling 20 off at a time,” and they don’t fit in a pickup truck.
A livestock broker periodically brought a big truck to farms that had cattle for sale. “We would bring the cattle in and we would use the scale house to weigh the cattle and basically determine which ones were ready to go to market, which ones weren’t,” she said.
At the scale house, the cattle entered a gate and stood on a platform. The scale operator moved weights around — not unlike a nurse moving weights on a scale at a doctor’s office — and recorded the total. The animals exited the other side.
“Most larger farms had a scale house near the road — usually a small weather-boarded building,” said Jane Echols Johnston, a Craig County resident and historian, in a statement provided by the Craig County Historical Society. “Often a large metal sign hung on the building reading ‘Fairbanks Scales.'”
Vermont inventor Thaddeus Fairbanks patented his first scale in 1830. It used levers to reduce the amount of counterweight needed.
“Today farmers in the Sinking Creek area take their cattle to a large scale behind Sinking Creek store,” Johnston wrote. “The days of the individually-owned scales are part of the past.”
E.G. Moses ran the farm until getting up at 4 a.m. to feed the cattle on January mornings got too much for him. When E.G. died in 2015, the property might have been subdivided and the farm buildings demolished.
Instead, the Moses property was sold to Tracy and Bill Frist, a couple with an interest in historic preservation.
In 2004, Tracy Frist, a Montgomery County native, bought Bellevue, a historic home about a mile away on Cumberland Gap Road, on the other side of Sinking Creek Valley. In 2015, she married Bill Frist, a former U.S. senator from Tennessee. (See our previous story.)
The Frists own about 960 acres along Little Mountain Road, including the scale house and barn. With its weathered hemlock siding, the scale building added to the picturesque beauty of the Sinking Creek Valley, but by the mid-2010s, it was nearing collapse. “The original scales were gone,” Tracy Frist said. “The roof had blown off. And we just decided we needed to save it. So we started the work.”
Scale house before restoration. Courtesy of Tracy Frist. 
Cattle entered through this gate and stood on the scale house platform. Photo by Randy Walker. 
Al Anderson (left) and Bill Frist weigh Tracy Frist, standing on the scale house platform. Photo by Randy Walker. 
Metal bar connects to underside of scale house platform. Randy Walker photo. 
Scale house interior. Photo by Randy Walker. 
Tracy Frist inside the scale house. Photo by Randy Walker.
The siding and the roof had to be replaced, but the inner structure — the platform and a sort of wood frame cage that confined the animals — was intact. “Even though the outside of the building was coming down … everything inside is exactly the way it has been for 100 years,” Bill Frist said.
The Frists contacted Building Specialists, Inc., of Roanoke. Building Specialists connected the Frists with Al Anderson of Timber Works of Interest, LLC in Pilot.
Anderson’s crew stripped the siding and roof. A forklift picked up and moved the platform. Stonemason Mark Cox of Floyd County rebuilt the foundation, then the forklift replaced the platform. Anderson’s crew put on a new Galvalume roof. Galvalume is steel coated with zinc, aluminum and silicon.
Tracy Frist acquired an antique replacement scale from Rodney Hutton, a farmer and friend on Cumberland Gap Road. While the Frists don’t plan to commercialize their scale — which would require certification by the state — it once again is a working scale.
Across Little Mountain Road is the pole barn, so-called because it uses unfinished, bark-on log poles — in this case, locust — as vertical supports. The poles were simply stuck in the ground without a foundation.
“It’s not a great piece of craftsmanship,” Tracy Frist said. “But, as Bill pointed out to me, it’s a great piece of American history.”
“This is an iconic barn … that for 100 years has been a focal point in many ways,” Bill Frist said, because it helps orient people and provides a visual sense of identity.
The pole barn had already partly collapsed when the Frists decided to save it. “There were probably 30 boards left on this whole wall,” Tracy Frist said. “You could see straight in it. This whole corner had fallen.”
The poles were rotten near the bases. Anderson’s men cut off the bottoms of the poles, then raised them up on precast concrete piers — not an original building technique but one which allowed most of each pole to be saved. The tin roof was also saved.
The new siding is custom-sawed red oak. The project took two months. Tracy Frist plans to use the barn to host community events when she is in Virginia.
The Frists split their time between Craig County and Tennessee. Bill Frist, former majority leader of the U.S. Senate, is chair of the global board of the Nature Conservancy, and a founding partner in Frist Cressy Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in health care businesses. Tracy is on the board of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
The Frists declined to disclose the cost of the restoration, but said they wanted to make sure the barn is still standing long after they’re gone. “It’ll go on for another 100 years,” Bill Frist said.
To Anderson, the craftsman, it was worth preserving because “buildings like that have a soul.”
“I think everybody in the county would like to see as much preserved as possible,” said Hutton. “We just don’t have the resources to preserve everything.”
For the former farm kid, “it makes my heart warm every time I see something they’ve done to the farm to preserve the heritage there,” Slaughter said. Farms of several hundred acres are becoming less common, with many people breaking up their properties into “farmettes.” Of Tracy Frist’s work in saving a large farm property, Slaughter said, “it’s really beautiful to see her doing that. I really, really love it. Every time she posts something I’m just very, very happy.”
