EDITOR'S NOTE: This story originally appeared in our March/April 2003 issue. It is being presented again here as part of our 30th Anniversary celebration.
Tennessee 52 negotiates the humps and dips of the Cumberland Plateau amid rural scenes-horses loosed in pastures, homes with manicured lawns in front and corn fields out back, ragged groves of plantation pines. What isn’t apparent to the traveler’s eye is that this byway passes through the looking glass. Like a latter-day Alice, the motorist rounds a bend and encounters an incongruous road sign printed in Olde English text. Suddenly a century and a score or years slip away. The architecture is 1880 Victorian, the blooms are heirloom primroses, the fare at the café Shepherd’s Pie. As the sign informs, this is “Rugby, Historic English Colony.”
The Percy Cottage
Restoration, as in all Rugby building, was painstaking and precise; lodging is available on the second floor.
Arrive at Rugby, Tenn. on a weekend in mid-May and the sense of other worldliness is keen. Costumed dancers frolic around the Maypole. Celtic tunes fill the air, followed by bluegrass ballads and then the drone of bagpipes. The artifacts of the southern mountains are also in evidence as artisans demonstrate basket making, chair caning, broom making and woodcarving. This festival that juxtaposes British and Appalachian cultures gives rise to curiosity- just how did this pocket of Britain arrive in these hills?
To paraphrase the musing of Thomas Wolfe in the opening paragraphs of "Look Homeward, Angel," a destiny that leads the English to the remote mountains of Tennessee is strange enough. The Englishman is one Thomas Hughes, like Wolfe most likely to be remembered as an author. Hughes' best-known work is "Tom Brown's School Days," a semi-autobiographical tale of coming of age in 19th century England.
Hughes was born to English gentry although his world view was not limited by the rigid social class distinctions of his times. Hughes attended Rugby, a public school, and eventually embarked on a career in law and politics. He was known as a statesman and social reformer, and it was his concern for the circumstances of the second and younger sons of upper-class English families that gave impetus to Hughes' unique American experiment.
Due to the custom of primogeniture in Britain, the oldest son usually inherited the family estate. In the late 1870s economic conditions made it difficult for young men who were not firstborn to make a living in the accepted professions, and many had fallen on hard times. Hughes reasoned that it would be better for them to learn farming and trades rather than "starve like gentlemen." Hughes looked to the America frontier as the place to realize his vision of a cooperative agricultural community that incorporated American ideals while retaining the essence of British culture. He chose as the site for his venture a remote area of the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee near where the rail line had just been extended from Chattanooga to Cincinnati.
Hughes dedicated the Rugby colony on October 5, 1880, declaring " ... we are about to open a new town here ... a new centre of human life, human thought, human activities ... in this strangely beautiful solitude." His optimism appeared well founded. Within four years 70 Victorian structures had been built and Rugby had more than 300 residents. They established a rustic yet cultured lifestyle that provided many opportunities for social, artistic and sporting activities.
But in reality the colony struggled from the beginning. A typhoid epidemic took seven lives in 1881. Several key buildings were destroyed by fire, including the Tabard Inn. This ornate structure served as the center of social life for Rugby residents and visitors until it burned to the ground in 1884. Financial problems, difficulty obtaining clear titles to land, and unusually severe winters all served to diminish the resolve of settlers. Ultimately these factors along with a dearth of farming and homesteading skills needed to eke out a living from the remote environs contributed to the demise of the colony. While Rugby never realized its founder's utopian vision, it survives today as testimony to the power of dreams.
And not just the dreams of Hughes. Although most of Rugby's inhabitants had left by 1900, a core of residents struggled to keep Rugby's structures intact and legacy alive. By the 1960s they had gathered enough momentum to consider putting Rugby back in the limelight. Spearheaded by the leadership of Brian Stagg, non-profit Historic Rugby was founded in 1966 to preserve Rugby's heritage and restore at least some of its former vitality. Today Historic Rugby under the direction of Stagg's sister, Barbara Stagg, continues to resurrect pieces of the past while at the same time crafting a vision of Rugby's future compatible with its historic roots.
It is an overcast, drizzly March day and I have taken a room at Newbury House, one of two Rugby lodging establishments dating from 1880. I am tempted to relish staying indoors and relax with a book by the fireplace amid the Victorian furnishings and adornments. Instead I begin to wander the grounds in pleasant solitude. What surrounds me is truly an heirloom spring. The world is awash in canary and lemon - the yellow simplicity of daffodils and forsythia. I observe redbud and dogwood trees that will showcase their magenta and ivory blossoms in the coming weeks.
Twenty of Rugby's original buildings still stand and three of the most significant are open for daily tours. I approach the Thomas Hughes Library and read the date of opening (October 5, 1882) printed on the glass of the doors. I enter and delight at the sight of books lining the walls literally floor to ceiling.
The still air maintains the cool of a cavern (there is no heat) and the pleasantly musty odor of aged paper permeates the chill. The only available light infiltrates through windows, which open to views of the surrounding woods. The gently tattered tomes of the children's section show evidence of more than a century of use. In fact, all 7,000 volumes in the library date from before 1900.
Across the road is Christ Church Episcopal, which has been used continuously for worship since 1887. It was constructed of virgin timber harvested from the local forest. Like much of Rugby it houses an Old World soul within a handhewn New World body- witness the brass and etched glass lamps suspended from bare wooden rafters or the rosewood organ dating from 1849 tucked by the altar on a polished hardwood floor.
Mealtime at Rugby means a short jaunt to the Harrow Road Cafe. The architecturally compatible cafe was built in 1985 near where the original stood in the 1880s. The cafe offers British and American fare as well as daily specials. After dining, a stroll down the wooden sidewalk leads to the Commissary (another faithful reconstruction of the original), which is the place to shop for mementos of your stay- British teas and Victorian frills along with music from Britain and Appalachia, crafts, and souvenirs.
The weather has turned mild and I decide to take a hike. The early colonists explored the surrounding hinterlands, and one can follow the same routes they trod through the woods. My choice is the path to the Gentlemen's Swimming Hole. The trail switchbacks into the gorge of the Clear Fork to where a natural pool in the churning waters provides a place for men to bathe and boys to be boys, now as then. On this early spring day a swim is out of the question but the bloodroot and hepatica raise their heads to the warmth of the sun that h as banished this morning's gray.
In the evening I return to Newbury House and discover anew the power of Rugby to transport visitors to another realm. A common theme emerges from the entries penned by guests in the journals kept in the lodging facilities. Rugby promotes (and maybe even demands) an escape from daily cares and routine, not just through its isolated location but through immersion in the architecture, furnishings and lifestyle from a bygone era- through the looking glass indeed.
In fact, if Thomas Hughes were to return to Rugby this 120-plus years after its dedication, he would find much unchanged. His home at Kingstone Lisle stands ready to receive him for the leisure and contemplation he once envisioned awaiting him in his golden years. The free-flowing streams still slice through the valleys beneath sandstone bluffs. The rail line that prompted Hughes to select this site still runs seven miles to the east. And his utopia lives on in this strangely beautiful solitude that is Rugby.