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    Historic Rugby
    Historic Rugby
    Historic Rugby
    Ebook208 pages53 minutes

    Historic Rugby

    By Barbara Stagg

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    About this ebook

    The Rugby colony opened amid great fanfare in 1880 on East Tennessee’s sparsely settled and rugged Cumberland Plateau. Famous British author and social reformer Thomas Hughes was the most involved and dedicated of Rugby’s Anglo-American founders. He intended Rugby to be a class-free, agrarian community based on cooperative enterprise, culture, and religious freedom. During its first decade, hundreds immigrated to Rugby from the British Isles; hundreds more came from other parts of America. Some stayed briefly, some for years, some for life. More than 60 cottages, villas, and commercial and institutional buildings of distinctive Victorian styles were built during Rugby’s early years. Though Rugby was briefly the most thriving community on the northern plateau, many factors prevented realization of Hughes’s utopian goals. Rugby today is a rare surviving example of 19th-century utopian community building. The historic town plan, surrounding woodland and rivers, and key original buildings survive, unspoiled by modern development, through committed restoration and preservation. Heritage tourism is bringing new life.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateJul 4, 2007
    ISBN9781439619322
    Historic Rugby
    Author

    Barbara Stagg

    Barbara Stagg has been executive director of Historic Rugby since 1977, building on the work of her late brother, who began the preservation effort in 1966. Using the best images and written resources from the Rugby archives, she narrates a visual journey through the intriguing history of Rugby, Tennessee.

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      Book preview

      Historic Rugby - Barbara Stagg

      Stagg

      INTRODUCTION

      From the 1840s to 1900, visionary leaders established many communities in America based on utopian goals. Why then, when most no longer exist or have been changed by modern development, has rural Rugby, Tennessee, not only survived with its heritage intact, but also begun to thrive again? Why was Rugby, for a time, an outpost of British culture in the near wilderness of the Cumberland Plateau? How did a 7,000-volume free public library come to be established there at a time when towns many times Rugby’s size had none?

      While the images and words in this book cannot answer these and other questions in detail, they provide the first pictorial window on life in Rugby from its 1880 founding to the present.

      Like many towns and communities, Rugby owes its location to a railroad. In 1878, land speculators began staking claims to thousands of acres on the northern Cumberland Plateau along the new Cincinnati Southern Railway line between Cincinnati and Chattanooga. Among them was industrialist and idealist Franklin W. Smith. His Boston-based Board of Aid to Land Ownership planned to relocate unemployed factory workers from the Northeast to the fresh air and forests of Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau, where they could engage in agriculture. But as the industrial depression eased, Smith looked for another investor.

      Enter famous British author, social reformer, and statesman Thomas Hughes. Known and beloved worldwide as the author of the semi-autobiographical young people’s classic Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Hughes also achieved prominence as a strong proponent of Christian socialism, of the cooperative movement, and of trade unionism in Britain, and as champion of the Union cause during America’s Civil War.

      While on a speaking tour in the early 1870s, Hughes was fascinated by what he saw in America. Especially intriguing to him were the possibilities that its vast, undeveloped land might hold for citizens of his own increasingly crowded country. As he toured the Northeast, speaking primarily on the need to heal the breach between the North and the South and America and England after the war, he became convinced that emigration to America, under the right circumstances, was the best course for many of his countrymen.

      Long a champion of Britain’s working classes, Hughes was also concerned about the plight of younger sons of Britain’s upper-class families. By tradition, they did not inherit but were nevertheless expected to live like gentlemen rather than engage in a trade or profession that was beneath them.

      As the idea for a prototype colony in America peopled with British emigrants grew in Hughes’s mind, he saw an opportunity for these two great nations, sharing the same heritage as well as the same language, to work together, forging stronger ties. When Rugby officially opened in 1880, Hughes intended it to be a class-free, agrarian community based on cooperative enterprise, cultural opportunity, religious freedom, and strict temperance. Our settlement is open, he declared, to all who like our principles and our ways.

      During its first decade, hundreds of people emigrated from the British Isles to Rugby, and hundreds more came from other parts of America. Some stayed only briefly, some for years, and some for life. More than 60 cottages, villas, and commercial and institutional buildings of distinctive rural Victorian styles were constructed during Rugby’s first decade. It was briefly the largest town on the northern plateau. Periodicals and newspapers in both England and America followed the ups and downs of Hughes’s distant Eden.

      Farming was often not pursued as avidly as other community building efforts. Colonists organized the Thomas Hughes Free Public Library, Rugby Public Purposes Association, the Rugby Social Club, the Rugby Drama Society, Ladies Church Working Society, Rugby Horticultural and Agricultural Society, and the Rugby Masonic Lodge. Christ Church Episcopal, still holding services today, was dedicated on the colony’s opening day.

      Around 300 people lived in Rugby at its mid-1880s heyday. Most of the gentry, farming, and working-class residents were of English, Scots-Irish, or Welsh descent. There were a few Germans and African Americans. By 1884, Rugby seemed to be thriving and achieving Hughes’s hope of a class free, cultured society willing to work with their hands.

      But Rugby never sustained most of Hughes’s idealistic goals for many reasons: poor communication with London-based management; soil that needed exhaustive clearing; an unusually severe first winter and drought-stricken summer followed by a typhoid epidemic; unsuitability of many of the colonists to manual labor; and perhaps most important, failure of the Cincinnati Southern Railway to build a spur line to Rugby as promised.

      While immigration to Rugby slowly ceased, it was never a ghost town. By 1900, some 125 people still lived in the Rugby area, though the mix was more Appalachian than British. Fortunately for future generations, some were determined to preserve Rugby and its heritage.

      From the 1920s through the 1950s, children of original colonists and others lovingly cared for Rugby’s public buildings, river gorge trails, and cemetery, even as private residences were often lost to neglect or fire. Extensive media attention was paid to the need to restore and preserve Rugby.

      Then, in the mid-1960s, a 16-year-old boy from nearby Deer Lodge resolved to begin what others had dreamed of—the permanent restoration and preservation of the entire village and its history. With help from area residents and people across Tennessee, Brian Stagg formed the Rugby Restoration Association in 1966. In 1972, Rugby was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

      Today 12 buildings have been restored or historically reconstructed by the renamed Historic Rugby. Private owners have restored their

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