Page 37 - Aug 2022

The picture on the wall of the library removes any
doubt. The handsome man in the photo is Thomas
Hughes, the Englishman who made his fortune as the
author of the Tom Brown's Schooldays, the book
that became a classic for generations of young
readers and made Hughes a very wealthy man. The
semi-autobiographical. story made both the
publilsher, MacMillan, and Mr. Hughes a million
dollars each, back when a million dollars was real
money.
Hughes came to what would become the Rugby
project through a back door. In 1878 investors began
to claim thousands of acres of land on the edge of
the Cumberland Plateau. They were hoping to cash in
on the new Cincinnati Southern Railway that ran
between Cincinnati and Chattanooga.
Franklin W. Smith, one of the investors, hailed from
Boston and was an industrialist with an idealistic
frame of mind. His Board of Aid to Land Ownership
developed a plan to relocate unemployed factory
workers from the industrial northeast, at the time
experiencing a depression, and place them in the
fresh air, amidst some virgin forest in the wilds of
Tennessee, on land he owned. Smith envisioned that
these factory workers would begin again, this time as
happy farmers. The fact that most of his prospects
knew nothing about farming when he sent them forth
was always a weak spot with back- to- the- farm
schemes. When the depression eased, Smith's recruit
population eased away in equal proportions. Smith
was left looking for someone to buy in, literally, to his
thousands of valueless acres.
Enter Thomas Hughes
If Franklin Smith was an idealist, Hughes, in addition
to being an author, was also a statesman and a social
reformer. He upped the do-good ante by being a
genuine utopian believer.
While Hughes had long been a champion of the
English working class, he was also concerned about
the second sons of England's landed gentry. "Unable
to inherit, but expected", as Hughes wrote, "to live like
gentlemen rather than engage in a profession or
trade that was beneath them. "
Like many British authors, including Dickens, Hughes
undertook an American lecture tour in the early
1870s. He was smitten by the promise of America
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and by the scale of the country and the availability
of undeveloped land. His tour took him to the
northeast and there he met Franklin W. Smith.
A deeply religious man, Hughes, was also interested
in how the rupture between North and South after
the Civil War ended could be mended. He felt, too,
that the relationship between Britain and the United
States sundered by the Revolutionary War and the
War of 1812 might be strengthened. The idea of
establishing a prototype colony in Tennessee,
peopled with immigrants from Britain, began to
form. Soon he articulated essentially a mission
statement, saying he hoped " for these two great
nations, sharing the same heritage as well as the
same language to work together", in the process
offering both opportunities and fostering stronger
ties between the two countries.
Hughes' ideas were music to Smith's ears as he
offered to sell him the land on which to start such a
colony. Hughes intended his colony to be a
class-free, agrarian community, based on
cooperative enterprise, cultural opportunity,
religious freedom, and strict temperance.
He named it after his own alma mater, Rugby, and
opened it in 1880 with an invitation to come to the
settlement offered to " all who like our principles
and our ways" .
In the first decades hundreds of people emigrated
to Rugby from Britain. Other settlers came from all
parts of America looking for opportunity in the
untamed backwoods of Tennessee.
Very few of the first settlers were actually farmers.
Some came, stayed briefly, and left discouraged.
Others came and stayed for years, while others
stayed for a lifetime. The work was hard; the
untamed land did not yield easily. The second sons
who had sparked the original idea in Hughes brain,
were not so interested in clearing the land and
plowing the fields. They started a tennis society
and a newspaper. By 1864, Rugby was being
referred to as Hughes' "distant Eden". It had more
than 60 cottages, villas, and commercial buildings,
including a multi-story hotel. The architecture was
Victorian Gothic and for a brief time, Rugby was the
largest town on the northern plateau.
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