Blue Ridge Country January/February 2021 - 16

OUR BLUE RIDGE TOWNS

Rugby, Tennessee Lives on and
Lives up to its Goals
Planned as a utopian settlement-a place where upper-class English second-born sons could
live hard-working, honest lives-tiny Rugby is a lesson in perseverance.
By JOAN VANNORSDALL | Photos courtesy HISTORIC RUGBY

I

n early October of 1880, Rugby founder Thomas
Hughes spoke to a crowd gathered in front of the
Tabard Inn, named for Chaucer's famous Canterbury Tales hostelry. Hughes had lofty goals for his
new Victorian town:
Our settlement is open to all who like our principles and our ways. Englishmen and Americans can
stand shoulder to shoulder, and work with one mind and
one heart for the same great end...Our aim and hope are
to plant on these highlands a community of gentlemen
and ladies; not that artificial class which goes by those
grand names,...but a society in which the humblest
members, who live by the labour of their own hands,
will be of such strain and culture that they will be able to
meet princes in the gate...
Hughes saw his carefully
planned Cumberland Plateau town
as a place where whites and Blacks,
Welsh coal miners and British noblemen would work side by side. He
championed Christian Socialism:
its elevation of the working classes
and elimination of class privilege.
Did Hughes-and his dream-
succeed? The answer lies in the
story.
The second son of an English
middle-class clergyman, Thomas
Hughes was educated at prestigious Rugby School, and soon after
graduating wrote a wildly successful novel, " Tom Brown's School
Days, " based on his years there. It
was money from the novel's sales
that provided Hughes with the
funds to build his " distant Eden "
in America. Hughes went on to
write a dozen more books, practice law, and serve in the House of
Commons.

16

BLUERIDGECOUNTRY.COM

He championed the rights of British commoners and
spoke against the English system of primogeniture, which
dictated that family wealth go to first-born sons, leaving
their brothers relatively penniless yet discouraging them
from going into crafts or trades for a living. (Never mind
the daughters, for whom marriage was the only option.)
Having traveled to America in 1870, Hughes dreamed
of a different way of life for his fellow second-born countrymen. With initial support of a group of Boston capitalists who owned large tracts of land in East Tennessee,
Hughes formed a group of equally wealthy Englishmen,
the Board of Aid to Land Ownership, Ltd. The new international company began in 1879 to plan and build
Rugby, which, in two years, had 300 residents, more than
a dozen buildings, private homes, a newspaper, a commissary owned by shareholders, a boarding house, and
the three-story Tabard Inn.
But the coming year brought hard times to Rugby.
The winter of 1881 was bitterly cold, followed by a hot
and dry summer. The English noblemen in Rugby found
farm work hard and uninteresting. In August, a typhoid
epidemic struck, found to have started at the Tabard Inn.
Five months later, just 60 residents remained in Rugby.
Hughes' London Board was determined to keep Rugby afloat. The Tabard was deep-cleaned and reopened; a
school opened, a public library was built and stocked. By
1884, the town had more than 400 residents.
Rugby's fortunes ebbed and flowed throughout the
last years of the 19th century. And when Hughes died
in 1896, he'd lost more than $1 million in today's currency on his " New Jerusalem. " For the first half of the
20th century, Rugby hung on as best it could, thanks to
the maintenance and oversight of the surviving children
of original settlers.
It took another visionary to save Rugby. Seventeenyear-old Brian Stagg, who'd grown up in nearby Deer
Lodge, formed the Rugby Restoration Association in
1966. The group successfully lobbied to have the town
placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.
Stagg and many others worked tirelessly to create, in
http://www.BLUERIDGECOUNTRY.COM
Blue Ridge Country January/February 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Blue Ridge Country January/February 2021
