Rugby, Tennessee: Some Account of the Settlement Founded on the Cumberland Plateau (review)

The village of Rugby, Tennessee, now carefully restored to its late-nineteenth-century appearance, is an evocative historic landscape of reform in the mountains of the American South. Namesake of the English public school that Thomas Hughes immortalized in Tom Brown’s School Days, Rugby was Hughes’s answer to the problems of educated Britons with no prospects for employment. As Benita J. Howell writes in her excellent introduction, Hughes published this collection of essays in 1881 to explain his vision for Rugby and recruit more settlers. Rugby emerges from his pages as not only “an outlet” for “young men of good education and small capital” (xli), but also as a rustic version of the English public school for adults. The surplus pool of well-educated men from the British gentry and mercantile class could build an alternative future for themselves at Rugby and in so doing protect the future of a rising generation of craftsmen and yeoman farmers who, Hughes predicted, would soon “be king” back home (19). At Rugby, Hughes promised a setting where young men could find themselves through manual labor in the open air of the Cumberland Mountains (gentlewomen were welcome at Rugby too, but they figure in Hughes’s account primarily as the objects of male gallantry). Downplaying the radical potential of his critique of modern Britain, Hughes emphasized “the English public-school spirit” as a model for social, spiritual, and intellectual community: “the spirit of hardiness, of reticence, of scrupulousness in all money matters, of cordial fellowship” (25–26).

Essays originally published as travelogues for readers in Great Britain brim with Hughes’s enthusiasm for the Cumberland Mountains and the public-school camaraderie taking root at Rugby. Like many of his contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic, Hughes was fascinated by the white and black natives of the mountain South and described local people with a combination of genuine interest and patronizing humor. At the same time, he recognized the inherent contradiction of a community where middle-and upper-class men labored like “peasants,” then headed off to the tennis courts and hired local youths for domestic service: “Will boots be blacked, I wonder, in the New Jerusalem?” (47). For those who still needed convincing, Hughes even provided a favorable report on its farming potential from Tennessee Commissioner of Agriculture Joseph Killebrew.

This welcome reissue of Thomas Hughes’s essays confirms Rugby’s place in the transatlantic history of social reform and illuminates the special role he hoped it would play in the lives of British public school graduates. Benita Howell’s introduction is doubly essential because, in addition to providing a thorough analysis of Hughes’s writings on Rugby, she locates Rugby in its American context. Howell describes how Hughes grafted his project onto a landscape already claimed by Franklin Webster Smith and the Boston Board of Aid to Land Ownership for unemployed New England industrial workers. She also notes the key role played by the railroad in opening up the Cumberland Mountains straddling Tennessee and Kentucky to economic development, a prospect both Smith and Hughes expected would ensure their community’s success. This book is essential reading for those interested in the history of utopian communities and the mountain South. Anyone planning a visit to the restored Rugby should read Hughes’s speech at Rugby’s 1880 opening ceremonies, in which he describes how the village’s public and private buildings, together with the natural landscape, would nurture personal freedom and the common good.