A Civil War-period map of Long Grass shows that Tarry family's slave quarters were not close to the main house. The house servants stayed in the house. The field hands lived in cabins farther out, in the area now roughly between the junction of Eppes Fork Road and Mill Creek Road and the North Carolina border. Their work in the fields cultivated and cured the tobacco that the wedding-present 1832 addition celebrated - a Greek Revival front built by Jacob W. Holt of Warrenton, North Carolina, when George Tarry married Mary Euphemia Hamilton. After the Civil War, the Tarry family gave acreage to their formerly enslaved laborers, and much of that land is still held by their descendants today. A freedmen workforce continued at Long Grass for years. The names of the enslaved community largely went unrecorded in the property's documentary history. One name that did survive, in family record, was Ellen - a woman who Edward Tarry Jr. raped, and who bore him a child.

The oldest part of Long Grass is a small hall-and-parlor house from around 1797 that already stood on the land when George Tarry arrived. The structure grew in four major waves. In 1831-32 Jacob W. Holt added a two-story, three-bay Greek Revival front, connected to the original by a one-story hyphen. The neoclassical entrance porch was probably salvaged from an earlier home along the Roanoke River. Around 1857 Holt returned and raised the roof of the old hall and parlor to make a full second story, adding a single-story Italianate porch across the rear. The 1832 entry hall walls are covered in an 18th-century Chinese hand-painted wall covering donated by the Cooper family of Henderson, North Carolina - salvaged from a demolished home on Charles Street. The 1992-94 renovation by Bruce and Sudie Park added a breakfast room and library, removed an intrusive 1950s bathroom, and installed a new terne metal roof.

The most striking surviving outbuilding is the c. 1832 ice house - a two-story wood frame structure with a 14-foot ice pit. Workers harvested ice each winter from shallow ponds across the plantation and packed it into the pit with alternating layers of sawdust, building up cold storage that lasted through Virginia summers. The second story later became a pigeon coop; squab provided Sunday breakfasts until the family stopped keeping pigeons in the 1960s. The c. 1832 smokehouse, noted in 19th-century letters as one of the largest and most secure in the region, has a door reinforced with iron peg nails every inch. The c. 1800 schoolhouse - a hewn-log structure that was a girls' school for Mecklenburg County families until the early 1900s - was renovated in the 1950s as a lake cottage. The tobacco packhouse, now structurally compromised, still has the humidor pit where cured tobacco was stored before being rolled in barrels to the Roanoke River for shipment to market.

Planted in the front yard is a Burr Oak called the Constitution Oak, given as a remembrance gift to George Patrick Tarry when he served as a delegate from Mecklenburg County to the Virginia constitutional convention of 1901-02. Burr Oak grows slowly and is unusual in Virginia. In 1951 a man traveling the counties of the original delegates found that few saplings had survived; he brought Evelyn Tarry a young tree from his collected acorns, and she planted it in the back yard, where it still grows. Long Grass keeps Big Daddy out front and Son in back. A huge Osage orange in the side yard, by family legend, came from Meriwether Lewis - a Tarry cousin - after the Lewis and Clark Expedition. And when the Corps of Engineers periodically draws down Kerr Reservoir for maintenance, the old road bed to Palmer Springs surfaces, along with the foundations of the mill, the ferry, the tannery, and the brick-making yard. The land remembers what the water hides.