The story below is from our July/August 2024 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
The Farm at Sinking Creek, with its recently renovated barn and scale house, buzzes with intellectual and creative stimulation — and a beautiful sense of belonging.
Taylor Reschka
Of the pole barn and scale house restoration, Tracy says, “We couldn’t do this ourselves. It’s a team effort. We couldn’t do it without the work crew and the state.”
Learning opportunities abound at The Farm at Sinking Creek. With help from Building Specialists, Inc., Bill and Tracy Frist have restored a pole barn and scale house that date back to the 1930s. The restored buildings are now at the center of a nexus of educational opportunity. Various learning disciplines intersect on the land, as do the past, present and — if the wishes of the Frists come true — many human hearts of the future.
Science Lessons on the Farm
Taylor Reschka
With room to roam and lots of love, the livestock at The Farm at Sinking Creek are happy.
The farm is busy, with many student groups visiting throughout the year. Tracy describes working with students of various groups such as 4-H, University Interns and high school prescribed-burn teams as one of the “most fulfilling” aspects of owning the land.
Tracy and Bill also offer internships for students ranging from middle school to graduate school and partner with universities to create scholarships to document the biodiversity of the farm. This work is important because Central Appalachia is one of the four most biodiverse regions in the world, alongside Borneo, Serengeti and the Amazon.
The farm’s biodiversity allows Ph.D. students to conduct research without traveling internationally. When a student from Maine found out that a rare flower grew on the farm, she drove down and spent two days camping on the property to learn more. She used that research to write her thesis. The Frists are excited that students are able to learn on the land in an “immersive and useful way.”
Taylor Reschka
Art on the Farm
Artists also get to deepen their education thanks to the rustic aesthetic only found in rural spaces. An artist-in-residence goes to the farm each summer to capture its beauty using their chosen medium.
Tracy and Bill also have an annual fellowship at Hollins University for students using the farm to develop their art, illustration, creative writing, scientific writing and environmental sciences studies. The open-air setting dotted with historical buildings is sure to enhance imagination and allow creatives to plunge more deeply into their capacity for innovation.
Architecture Lessons
Because of the age and condition of the structures, restoration of the barn and scale house required overcoming challenges, including finding the correct wood to replace what was rotted or missing. The Frists contracted Building Specialists, Inc. of Roanoke as their general contractor.
The project manager, Darrell White, notes that both buildings had extensive damage to both architectural and structural portions of the buildings. To maintain the historic integrity of the buildings, White subcontracted additional help, Al Anderson of Timber Works of Interest, LLC.
When Anderson arrived on site and discovered the barn and scale house were “trying to go back to the earth,” he used a hydraulic clamp with a forklift to raise the vertical posts back up.
Anderson’s crew got to learn something new on the project, as this was their first restoration of a scale house. The pole barn restoration also marked the crew’s first time working on a foundation comprised of poles.
Thanks to this thoughtful labor of love, the crews of Building Specialists and Timberworks were able to imitate traditional construction practices and preserve these pieces of history.
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Taylor Reschka
Tracy mixed different shades of paint together at Sherwin Williams to develop the “perfect shade of red” for the barn.
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Taylor Reschka
The original scale head box pictured here no longer functions, but its replacement can weigh livestock.
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Taylor Reschka
Pole barns have high ceilings and open, undivided spaces.
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Taylor Reschka
The mortise and tenon joint woodworking technique pictured here dates back thousands of years. The process is labor-intensive, but also yields strong joints that stay intact for millennia.
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Taylor Reschka
The scale house foundation is a combination of stone and cinderblock and has a new tin roof.
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Taylor Reschka
While this pole is from a tree, the name “pole barn” became popular during The Great Depression, when telephone poles began to be repurposed in construction.
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Taylor Reschka
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Taylor Reschka
History & A Touch of Mystery
Of course, no historical restoration is complete without a little intrigue.
The scale house originally contained Fairbanks scales that were used to weigh livestock in Craig County before it went to market. Fairbanks scales were first produced by two brothers, Erastrus and Joseph, in the early 1800s, and have been manufactured since then up to the present.
But the balance beam part of the original Fairbanks scales was missing when the restoration began. Tracy set out to find the most historically accurate match available.
Just down the road, Tracy found another scale. However, the balance beam didn’t have the Fairbanks name on it. All it had was the letters “E” and “J.”
Anderson (metaphorically) put on his detective hat and discovered that the Fairbanks brothers marked their pre-patent work with only their initials. He consequently speculated that the replacement scale was made pre-patent, around the 1830s. Mystery solved.
Taylor Reschka
A Place for Connection
Tracy describes why barns are more than materials and even craftsmanship in this way: “Barns take on the persona of women, often referred to as female. I attribute that to their sense of gathering, shelter, stability, non-judgment and total sense of home. Everyone is welcome and the front light is on.”
Bill similarly believes that the completed barn and scale house will be a lively center for intellectual exchange that combats loneliness and social isolation.
The Frists imagine 12 high school students who come every six months to do prescribed burns doing calculations in the barn together afterwards. Smoky and grimy, they’ll review what they learned and did right. They envision groups of conservationists and bird watchers sitting in a circle and saying, “This is what we learned today.” Bill describes the restored buildings as full of “light, community, education and social interaction.”
The barn and scale house also allow Tracy to connect with her own formative years. She describes her zeal for initiating the project by saying, “Saving a limping pole barn and scale house is 100% my DNA. I grew up immersed in barns and scale houses of SW Virginia. They are the country stores of my childhood.”
One of her favorite songs is Miranda Lambert’s “The House that Built Me.” In one verse of the song, Lambert sings, “You leave home, you move on/And you do the best you can/I got lost in this whole world/And I forgot who I am.”
While Tracy lived elsewhere as a young professional, she always thought of Southwest Virginia as home. She sees homesickness as a “natural part of human development.” Fortunately, returning to Craig County with lifelong friends in the area, that’s no longer an issue.
Home is where the heart is. And for Tracy, that means home is where the farm is.
Living History
Taylor Reschka
With the calloused hands of a laborer and the mind of a poet, Anderson explains what it’s like to work on so many historical structures. He says, “Old buildings have a soul. There’s so much history in them. You can imagine who used them and imagine what they were doing.” Project manager White agrees that the structures “echo the labor of generations past and the passage of time itself.”
In this way, history comes alive, allowing people to make connections in their own lives and to the people who came before them.
This connection is facilitated by the preservation of historical buildings. In the chorus of “The House that Built Me” Lambert sings, “Out here it’s like I’m someone else/I thought that maybe I could find myself.” Bill notes that sometimes part of connecting to yourself and to memory and to the past is visiting a tangible, physical building. Such visits allow everyone to have their “own personal interface” with history to find “their place in the arc of time.”
The Frists hope the restored scale house and barn aid visitors in that self-discovery. Of all the science, architectural and history lessons to be learned at The Farm at Sinking Creek, this one is perhaps the most poignant: To truly know ourselves, to find our personal meaning in the current moment, we may do well to connect to the souls of history and be guided by the ghosts of the past.
The story above is from our July/August 2024 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!