Hi Steven, I would definitely agree that the best way to do this would be to use the beam tool and I will definitely check that out for future reference. I chose to analyze this as a 3D solid only because I wanted to begin understanding this area of Mechanica/Simulate. I would also welcome your feedback once you have a chance to look at my model. I think Chauncey Wenner's comment is a good explanation as to why my results are skewed.
For what it's worth, I did figure out a way to alter the display of the beam after loading. In short, I had to manually edit the max and min values on the fringe plots so that I would get more reasonable results for the rest of the beam.
Thanks for the help.