By Tabitha Evans Moore
Editor & Publisher
It’s Monday afternoon and Moore County Roads Superintendent Shannon Cauble and I are loaded into her pickup truck, driving down local backroads. As we begin the interview, I ask about taking a photo for this article and she grimaces. Last night was hair-oiling night and her wavy brown hair is twisted up into a loose bun.
“Never mind, I get it,” I laugh. As someone who also oils her hair then stuffs it into a baseball cap the next day, I get it. “You can just send me a photo after I’ve written the article.”
Moments later, she’s teaching me about what it means when a road “alligators” on Cumberland Springs Road. The juxtaposition between a woman who cares about split ends and one who can tell you exactly what happens when mud freezes on an asphalt road feels stark until you spend a little more time with her and realize those two things are just the same person.
Shannon Ferrell Cauble grew up in Moore County and never left. She graduated from Moore County High School in 1992, attended Motlow State and then drove back and forth to Middle Tennessee State University rather than move away — earning a degree in plant and soil science with a minor in mathematics. She and her husband of almost 23 years, Keith Cauble — a 1990 MCHS graduate — still live off Pleasant Hill Road. Moore County voters elected her Roads Superintendent in 2020, a position she inherited from her father, Milton Ferrell, though Shannon is quick to complicate that narrative.
“I actually think he would have preferred it if I hadn’t run,” she says. “I don’t think he wanted me to carry what he knew was the weight of it.”
She’s never not working.
Ask Shannon if it’s possible to drive a local road without mentally cataloguing what it needs and she doesn’t hesitate.
“I work 24 hours a day,” she says. “I am never not the roads superintendent.”
She describes a weekend hike with Keith through Bankhead National Forest, deliberately trying to decompress. It almost worked.
“I do a little better when I get down there,” she concedes. “But we were on a lot of county roads and I am just kind of comparing them to mine, and then the problem starts.”
Even family hunting trips to Colorado become field research.
“I am obsessed with the snow removal the whole time,” she says. “How are they doing it? Because they’re pros at it, and I want to get better.” She pauses. “Their roads turn white in November and you don’t see the actual road again until May.”
It’s not anxiety — it’s orientation. Shannon describes her job in a single word she offered a colleague during a particularly brutal stretch of storm season, a word that stopped the conversation cold: triage.
“What’s bleeding to death right now that I can go make better with what I have?” she says. “And when I say bleeding to death, I don’t mean is there a gravel road that someone would prefer were paved. If they can get down their roads safely, that’s not bleeding to death right now.”
The math is brutal.
Moore County has 254 miles of road to maintain. The Moore County Roads Department runs on roughly $1.8 million a year — nearly all of it state gas tax revenue, distributed based on population and square miles, not road miles.
“Road miles don’t matter,” Shannon says, in a tone that suggests she has repeated this fact until she’s tired of it. “We have 254 road miles, and it wouldn’t matter if we had 100 or 500. It would still be the same money.”
Repaving a two-lane road runs between $200,000 and $250,000 per mile. At those prices, $1.8 million covers roughly nine miles of road in a good year — out of 254. And that’s before labor, equipment, materials for everything else the department handles.
“That’s the reason our roads are like this,” she says plainly. “We’re not alone. A lot of counties are in the same boat.”
Given those constraints, Shannon has developed a philosophy rooted in her background: the roads that serve the most people get the most attention first. She did an analysis comparing daily traffic on some of the county’s lesser-used roads. A rural road like Spankem Road gets around 50 cars a day while Cobb Hollow Road on the north side sees roughly 3,000. Both need attention — a fact she’s all too aware of each day.
“Because we are gas tax funded — which is a use fee — I feel like the roads that get used the most should get more money spent on them, because they serve the most people,” she says. “I try to at least make sure those roads are in the shape to handle that amount of traffic.”
To the residents on roads that aren’t getting attention: “Nobody wants their road paved more than I do,” she says. “Not them, not their neighbor. Because with infinite money, we’d have a rotation. Nobody wants these roads paved and perfect more than I do — because that’s my responsibility. But you can only do what you can afford to do.”
The soil knows what it’s doing.
Shannon started college in engineering, spent two years there, and still carries the math instincts with her. Combined with the soil science degree, it gives her something most road superintendents don’t have: the ability to look at a piece of ground and predict what it’s going to do before it does it.
The stretch of Cumberland Springs Road near the solar farm facility is her case study.
“I knew this was going to be a disaster because of the soil structure,” she says. She raised it with local and solar farm representatives in planning meetings — multiple times, and in private — warning them they were going to need significantly more rock than they’d budget for a normal site.
What makes that soil so unusual goes about six feet down. On top, it’s loamy with some clay. Beneath that is a layer of hard-packed clay — “almost like a Louisiana swamp gumbo type,” Shannon says — and above the clay, a fine creek-like gravel layer. Water drains down through the top layers, hits that clay, and stops.
“It just sits there and drains out very slowly, so it keeps it very spongy,” she says. “It’s a Tennessee swamp.”
Her knowledge of that soil isn’t just academic. Her father grew up near Highway 130, and Shannon spent enough childhood time fencing in that area to know it firsthand.
“Most of the year, you dig a three-foot post hole and you’ve got water,” she says.
When the mud from construction activity reached a point where she felt it was a genuine hazard — freezing on the road surface, creating miles of slick conditions rather than the occasional patch — Shannon closed Cumberland Springs Road.
The response was swift and, in her assessment, effective.
“It got their attention,” she says. “In that 48 hours I gave them, they did more to prevent mud than they had the entire time. It wasn’t a hundred percent solution, but it helped dramatically.”
The road itself took the damage she expected. The alligator cracking visible along the corridor isn’t purely from traffic — it’s from freezing mud working on compromised pavement from below. When the construction project wraps, she believes the road won’t just need repaving.
“Asphalt is only as good as what’s underneath it,” she says. “You’ve got cracks and loose places — I guarantee you in places you can reach down and pick these pieces up, they’re not tied down anymore. So, when you pave over that, if you’ve got something underneath that’s weak, it’ll break right through the top.”
We’re not the heroes. We back up the heroes.
I ask Shannon about the things the department does that most residents never notice. She thought about this one ahead of time. She even asked her secretary — 25 years on the job — for his take.
“I don’t feel like we’re heroes,” she says, “but I do feel like we back up the heroes.”
When there’s a storm, the Moore County Roads Department is running in front of the ambulance — literally. She describes a call on Turkey Creek Church Road during icy conditions, the department running plow and salt truck ahead of the ambulance to clear the way for a patient pickup. This past winter, she was driving the salt truck herself when a call came in about a fall near Chestnut Ridge Road.
“I said, who’s closest, and it was me,” she says. “By the time they got there, I had the road salted. They got to the house.” She pauses. “That’s what we do. We’re not the heroes, but we help the heroes get there.”
Being the woman in the room
Shannon has worked in male-dominated environments her entire career. She doesn’t experience her crews as a source of friction — “they’re good men” — but she’s more measured about some members of the public.
“There are some members of the public who think they’re going to come over here and tell me what to do,” she says. “You have to be stern so they understand there’s really no difference between you and a man in that office. They’re not going to push you around.”
When I ask whether she ever feels pressure — from society, from this community, from anyone — to be sweeter, to not make a fuss, she laughs.
“My mother,” she says. “Mother says I have no tact. I said, Mom, I am too old to have tact.”
But she’s only rough when necessary, she adds.
“I would love it if I could go to work tomorrow and say yes, and smile all day long, and never say no, just say yes all day. Most of the things people ask for, I want to do — we just can’t afford it.”
On the temperature in local politics
Shannon is careful here, but she’s not evasive. She’s watched the civic temperature rise in Moore County here lately — in public meetings, on social media, in conversations that turn hostile before anyone has checked a single fact.
“I’ve seen whole awful conversations online where not a single person had reached out to me or the office to ask why, or if something was even true,” she says.
She describes what she sees as the actual fault line — not Republican versus Democrat, not local versus newcomer exactly, but something harder to name. People sorting themselves into opposing camps based on information ecosystems that may or may not be rooted in anything real. She’s gotten deliberate about it: when she sees someone making confident claims online about her department’s work, she goes directly to the source. Direct message first. Front door second if necessary.
“If it’s somebody who ought to know better,” she says, “I let them know they are in fact ignorant. Literally.”
She notes that when she does this — when the conversation moves from a comment section into the real world — it usually works.
“The temperature changes when you have an in-real-life conversation with someone,” she says.
As for the target she sometimes feels on her back as an elected official: “It’s social media,” she says, without hesitation. “It’s so easy to be a keyboard warrior.”
But she has made her peace with it, mostly by stepping back from the noise and staying focused on what she can actually control. That, Shannon Cauble would say, is enough.•
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