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Rugby: Utopian Oasis in Tennessee is for anyone interested in an in-depth look at the curious utopian community, Rugby, founded by British social reformer Thomas Hughes in 1880. The community lasted less than 10 years, but like other utopian experiments in the United States, it is worthy of study. This site tries to answer some of the following questions:

• What social problem was Hughes trying to solve when he founded Rugby?
• Why did he come to Tennessee?
• Even though the community was short-lived, why did it leave an architectural legacy in the Cumberland Plateau unlike anything in the area?
• What factors led to Rugby's failure?
• Where can I find more information about Rugby?

The site is broken into 4 major content themes and a resource page. Each themed section contains an historical narrative hyperlinked to images and transcribed documents relating to Rugby, such as portions from the Rugby Handbook printed in 1884 and letters Thomas Hughes wrote to the British newspaper The Spectator. All of those links are combined in the Rugby Resources section, along with bibliographies and links to other web resources on the subject.

My interest in the Rugby community dates back to 1995 when I moved to Nashville, Tennessee to work for the summer. At the time, I was an American Studies graduate student at the University of Notre Dame and was concerned with experiencing different cultural regions to expand my understanding of American life; this brought me to Music City. Though working during the week, I hopped in my Mercury Topaz on weekends to explore other parts of Tennessee and southern Kentucky. One such journey brought me to the Historic Rugby settlement in the Cumberland plateau.

Earlier that year, I researched Thomas Hughes’s Rugby for a paper and wanted to visit this strange, failed utopian settlement of British aristocracy in America. This web site grew out of my Rugby research and into a project for a graduate history class at George Mason University. Feel free to email me with any questions or concerns regarding the site: sbrennan@gmu.edu.