homas Hughes's
words on the opening day of his visionary community reflected his dreams
for the young men populating his Rugby in the New World.
In one word, 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, both in Europe and here, the joint product of feudalism and wealth, but in 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, without embarrassment and without self-assertion, should any such strange person ever present themselves before the gate tower of Rugby in the New World.1
Also invoking Biblical imagery of American utopian rhetoric Hughes referred to his colony as a “New Jerusalem,” as John Winthrop once referred to his Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. Hughes devised the plan for the Rugby Colony, settled as an oasis in the woods on the Cumberland Plateau in Northeastern Tennessee. Influenced greatly by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hughes felt that working the land was an honorable pursuit for educated men. In an address to the public school children at the Rugby School in England—for which his colony is named—Hughes told the adolescents, “For those who find after leaving school that they have no such outlook (for “honest” work) in England, I undoubtedly believe that they can't do better than go back to the land.”2 Hughes founded Rugby to create an “honorable” alternative for sons of aristocratic English families in the United States.
Hughes's dream survived only for eight years as the economic and cultural
background of Rugby's residents ultimately contributed to its demise in
1888. The young men and women who populated this rustic village came from
a world filled with servants, lawn tennis, and the theater, which contrasted
greatly with the rural community on the Cumberland Plateau. Rugbeians'
aristocratic experiences in England permeated every aspect of their new
life in America where they attempted to replicate the urbane lifestyle
they understood. Rugby's elite class of settlers, who distinguished themselves
from their neighbors, prevented the community from succeeding. Rugby's
architecture, their propensity for leisure and subsequent failure of economic
endeavors, and their perceptions of the native Tennesseeans magnified
the differences in class between the colony and its neighbors. The evidence,
reflected in the genteel nature of Rugby’s upper-class residents, ultimately
prevented the colony from ever succeeding in the rural hills of Tennessee.
hat brought Hughes's attention
to the plight of previously privileged sons? Much of Hughes's work
in England focused on education reform. In the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth
centuries every British secondary school and university only accepted
members of the Anglican Church, and refused admission of children from
different religious backgrounds. By the mid-nineteenth century, reformers
attempted to remedy the problem and open the public school doors to a
more diverse cross-section of boys. Thomas Arnold implemented this practice,
along with other aspects of educational reform at his Rugby
School. As Arnold's student, Thomas Hughes wanted to continue implementing
change initiated at Rugby at other schools. Through his experiences at
Rugby, Hughes felt he could sow seeds of reform by writing the novel,
Tom Brown's Schooldays in 1857. 3
The success of his novel brought him increased notoriety in the United
States. Hughes was already known in northern intellectual circles before
the Civil War because of his political views as an abolitionist.
Hughes was not only active writing, but served as a politician and reformer.
He founded The Working Men's College in London and
attempted to break down class barriers at Oxford
University, his alma mater.4 Hughes also served as a Liberal member
of Parliament, a judge, and Queen's Counselor. He worked in the Cooperative
and Christian-Socialist movement, establishing labor associations and
cooperatives throughout Great Britain. Despite his efforts to dissolve
barriers for the working class in labor and education, the primogeniture
system of the British gentry bothered him immensely. He viewed it as the
last remaining vestige of the Middle Ages. The practice gave the oldest
son of wealthy families the entire inheritance—land, money, and valuables.
This left younger sons without land and few “respectable” options such
as studying medicine, studying law, or joining the clergy.
5 Many of these younger sons
attended the public schools, where Hughes observed their plight. Hughes
set out to remedy this problem and searched for a suitable settlement
for these young, genteel, educated men.
When he first visited the United States in 1870 and Hughes received a hero's welcoming that would not mirror the reception in Eastern Tennessee. Many dignitaries, including the Secretary of State Hamilton Fish, Charles Sumner, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow received him as their guest.6He toured the United States making numerous contacts who later assisted him in finding land for his settlement. A group of Bostonians who were searching for unoccupied farm lands to promote migration from the crowded Northeast, notified him of good land in Northeast Tennessee. Liking the idea, Hughes gathered investors and took over the project in 1879.7He initiated an Anglo-American coalition and formed the Board of Aid to Land Ownership. By June of the next year, the organization purchased 50,000 acres to resell to Rugby colonists. A settler needed to put down one-third the price of a lot and then paid off the rest within two years.8 This system stopped the cycle of primogeniture, allowing aristocratic sons to own land. Despite the original organization's international composition, the majority of settlers were British.
From
the beginning, although nestled in America, the settlement at Rugby, Tennessee
retained a high level ofBritish elitism which was especially evident in
the physical plant of the colony. By the official opening day on October
5, 1880 the Rugby Colony consisted of the Tabard Inn, three boarding houses,
a commissary, and some private homes. The name of the inn, the “Tabard,”
borrowed its title from the Southwark Tabard Inn in The Canterbury
Tales. This small gesture reflected the omnipresent British heritage
of the colony. Even the name of the colony, “Rugby,” harkened back to
Hughes's days at the Rugby school in England.
1Thomas Hughes, Rugby, Tennessee: The American Utopian Adventure (1881; reprint Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, 1975), 106.
2Hughes, Rugby, Tennessee, 47; 24-5; 135.
3Brian Stagg, The Distant Eden: Tennessee's Rugby Colony (n.p.: Paylor Publications, 1975), 1.
4W.H.G. Armytage, “Public School Paradise,” Queens' Quarterly 57 (Winter 1950-51): 530.
5Stagg, A Distant Eden, 2-3.
6Ibid., 3.
7“The New Rugby,”Harper's Weekly 24 (Oct. 16, 1880): 665.
8Armytage, “Public School Paradise,” 531-2.