Fieldstone Farms History

When high school graduate Cecil B. Sims began Vanderbilt Law School in 1911, middle Tennessee scarcely knew the legacy that would unfold from this man’s life. Perhaps graduating first in his class gave the Vanderbilt community an indication. Maybe Nashville began to recognize it in 1921, when Sims founded a law firm with his friends Frank Berry and Frank Bass, and established a reputation for his intelligence, fairness and wide-ranging interests.

But his family had always known. Sims was “everyone’s hero,” his granddaughter Becky Sims Campbell of Nashville describes, “ and a genius.” During the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, while growing a law firm, managing a home in Belle Meade, and fathering four children with his wife Grace, he made a hobby out of farming at Cecilwood – the land that most Fieldstone Farms residents now call home. Purchased by the Sims in 1927, the summer homestead was later named for their son, Sgt. Cecil Sims, Jr, lost to World War II.

“He read every farm book that ever came out,” remembers his daughter, Grace “Susie” Sims Irvin. “He was a completely self-taught farmer.” Sims read voraciously every evening, often finishing a book in one setting. He required a mere four hours of sleep each night. All the Sims’ summer nights were spent on the screened-in sleeping porch of their three-room house made of numbered beech logs transferred from the 1800s Perkins cabin.

With the help of trusted tenants the Sawyer family, Sims rotated fields of barley, oats, corn and wheat to sustain Cecilwood’s livestock. As children and grandchildren grew up on the farm, Mr. Sims researched and built useful and recreational novelties such as a bridge made of old telephone poles, tree house, observatory, bee hives, tennis court, zip line, an automated water trough hooked to a well, and an innovative concrete-floored hog house.

Meanwhile, he caught the week-day bus into Nashville to grow Bass Berry and Sims into a premier law firm. As a Vanderbilt University trustee, Sims played a significant role in the law school’s re-opening after the war and its voluntary integration in the 1950s.

It was Sims’ clients – a railroad company and construction company – who delivered a red caboose to Cecilwood in the 1960s as a playhouse for the grandchildren, who called him “Oppa.” Irvin recalls summer parties with the band standing atop the caboose, friends dancing on the tennis courts below, and serving food under the workhouse lean-to. Other evenings, Oppa enjoyed reading to the grandchildren in the caboose.

Summer is here! Neighbors enjoying the clubhouse pool swim in the shadow of the red L&N caboose. Ever wonder how it got here?

Here’s the story.

Before being sold to developers in the late 80s, this land was, indeed, a farm. It began as a summer hobby for Cecil Sims, a prodigy who went straight from high school to Vanderbilt Law School in 1911, then graduated at the top of his class. In 1921 he founded the Nashville firm Bass, Berry, & Sims. A few years later the three business partners also went in on 800-some acres in Williamson County. Mr. Sims eventually bought out his partners, hired tenants to farm the land, and lived and worked here during summers and holidays with his wife Grace and their four children.

By the 1960s, Cecilwood Farm (named in memoriam for Mr. Sims’ oldest, Cecil Jr., who did not return home from WWII) was teeming with grandchildren. They called Mr. Sims “Oppa.” He was always dreaming up a new invention for the working of the farm, and a new play thing for the grandkids. A zip line and a tree house were two of their favorites.

As the story goes, told by his granddaughter Becky Irvin Campbell, Oppa had always loved trains; he worked at Union Station as a teen and young adult. As a ticket taker, he befriended everyone and later came to represent most of the rail lines. So he masterminded his best idea yet: a deal with L&N to give him two cabooses, and a construction company client to deliver them.

(Becky’s parents moved to the farm full-time when she was young, so she has decades of memories here.) She recalls the day the #42 was delivered:

I remember like it was yesterday – watching this caboose come up piece by piece. They had all of us grandchildren sit up on the side of the hill. We had no idea what was getting ready to happen!
Oppa had already put gravel out on the spot where he wanted it to go. First came the enormous, heavy steel tracks up the hill. Then they laid the tracks, the undergirding, and the ties. Next came the wheels – they were so heavy! I remember the men operating the machinery to get the pieces in place. Then came the box which was placed on top.
The caboose had a working wood stove and 7 small cots (it was eating and sleeping quarters for the L&N train crew). Oppa did all the cooking on the stove, and he’d stay up late reading to us and telling stories. We had spend-the-night parties, boy scout meetings, nights looking at the stars… it was magical. I think that was his favorite thing to do on the farm – read to us in the caboose.
We spent as much time on top of the caboose as we did inside. I got my best tans sunbathing on the roof! You could see everything from up there, felt like you were king of the world! We all fell off the caboose at one time or another, but if you fell – well – you just got back up again.
Every summer we’d have a big dance. The bluegrass band set up on top of the caboose and the tennis courts just below became the dance floor. We had the time of our lives.

The second caboose Mr. Sims had delivered to the Nashville Boys & Girls Club, for many more children to enjoy. “My mother would be the first to say, whatever he did for his family, he did in much greater measure for someone in the community,” Becky added.

When they sold to Harlan Co. in 1987 and Fieldstone Farms began building, the caboose kept its original spot. The tennis court area became the pool, the courts moved down the hill, and the original log house the site of the clubhouse.

Resident Katie Smitherman and volunteers spent a year renovating the caboose for her Girl Scout capstone project in 2012-13. It saw another much-needed round of repair and repainting in 2020-21 thanks to Eagle Scout Weston Poff and the HOA.

So the red L&N 42 we see today is a symbol of a benevolent grandfather joyfully giving to his community. It represents a love of trains and hard work, of ingenuity and delight, of time spent outside playing, reading, dreaming, dancing, stargazing…

and of course

sunbathing!