Rugby, Tennessee

After leaving Nashville, we dropped the motorhome off in an RV park along highway 40 and drove about an hour north to a little town named Rugby.

Rugby isn’t a little town, it’s TINY.

Back in the 1880's, Thomas Hughes, British author and social reformer, bought the land that the town of Rugby sits on, sight unseen, envisioning a new town with a strong agricultural community through cooperative enterprise, while maintaining a cultured lifestyle, free of the rigid class distinctions that prevailed in Britain.


The idea for the colony grew out of Hughes’ concern for the younger sons of wealthy British families who were under the custom where the eldest son usually inherited everything, leaving the younger sons with only a few socially accepted occupations in England.

There were several problems with this plan. For one, there are only about four inches of dirt over solid rock in the area, making farming not very feasible, and the British sons who arrived in this “Utopia,” thought it didn’t look good to be seen actually working, and preferred to play lawn tennis, croquet and the such.


They actually had no idea how to work. In spite of these drawbacks, somehow they managed to build some 70 Victorian buildings and eventually 300 residents called Rugby home.

The Inn became the social center, they printed a weekly newspaper, had a general store, stables, sawmills, boarding houses, a drug store, church, library and others. Hughes brought his 89-year old mother and his niece from England to Rugby to help anchor the town.

The day we arrived in Rugby, we found a number of the original buildings still there and in fairly good shape. There is a tour of a home, the school, church and library. A couple other buildings are now shops.

One of the homes from the early days.

The original church, still in use today.

The library was probably the most interesting because it held a few thousand very old books many of which are worth a huge amount of money. Sadly, they are faced with possibly having to sell some to pay for the upkeep of the buildings.

School and current Visitor Center

Library

We were instructed not to touch any of the books, but the tour guide opened a few of the news magazines from the 1800’s that had wonderful pictures in them. I was glad they let me photograph them.

Library

 

Rugby suffered a typhoid epidemic that killed several people and then the Inn burned down.


After that, it was pretty much down hill, but still today there are a number of residents who have built Victorian style modern homes in the woods. It is a beautiful area, though not the “Utopia” that Mr. Hughes envisioned. Those things just never work out, do they?

We drove down a typical old Tennessee country road and found the Rugby Cemetery. In it we came across the graves of the people who died during the Typhoid epidemic and Mr. Hughes' mother's grave marker.

We enjoy stumbling onto these “off the beaten trail” gems here and there, and Rugby is one of them.