Before Rugby, Tenn., became a resort for the second sons of English gentry, it was intended to be a place for relocation of out-of-work factory workers from the Northeast.
The efforts of a group of Bostonian investors — led by hardware merchant Franklin W. Smith — to secure a large chunk of property on the northern Cumberland Plateau is what ultimately led to English author Thomas Hughes’ colony here.
In the 1870s, worldwide economic recession was tightening its grip on the United States — particularly in New England, where the post-Civil War industrial boom was brought to a swift halt by the financial crisis of 1873. More than 18,000 businesses went bankrupt, and national unemployment soared well above 10 percent.
As the recession worsened, Smith — an idealistic reformer — led a group of investors, which had established the Boston Board of Aid to Land Ownership in an effort to encourage settlement of America’s remote and largely uninhabited regions, to explore the possibility of relocating unemployed industrial workers to the Cumberland Plateau.
While the recession had claimed almost 100 railroads across the United States, the brand-new Cincinnati-Southern Railroad — which would later become Norfolk-Southern — was not one of them. Cincinnati-Southern traversed the rugged Cumberland Plateau on its way from Cincinnati to Chattanooga. It was along this route that Smith and his partners discovered the place that would eventually be called Rugby.
The Boston group made several excursions into the central and southern U.S. searching for a large tract of land that would accommodate their plans. In Rugby they discovered a vast unsettled area of pristine beauty — virgin forests, clean air and the sheer scenic beauty of the Clear Fork and White Oak river gorges.
Originally, Smith and his fellow Bostonians secured rights to some 350,000 acres of property in Scott, Morgan and Fentress counties — stretching all the way from what would become Elgin in Scott County to Clarkrange in Fentress County. Ultimately, though, they settled on 75,000 acres, primarily in Scott and Morgan counties.
The Board of Aid to Land Ownership began laying out lots in the late 1870s, but something happened: the recession was ending, and Bostonians were returning to the factories.
That’s where Hughes came into the picture.
A Place For English Gentry
An English judge and attorney, Hughes was most famous for his novel, Tom Brown’s School Days, which he had published in 1857. The novel was a sort of an autobiography, set at England’s famous Rugby School, which Hughes had attended in his youth.
In England’s Victorian period, primogeniture — the inheritance of the family’s land and assets by the oldest son — played a primary role in society. Hughes, who was a second son, fancied himself a reformer. As a result, Tom Brown’s School Days espoused his own ideas of society, which more closely resembled Christian socialism than Victorian materialism.
The problem with reform, though, is that it takes years to accomplished. Disenchanted with England’s class structure, Hughes had begun exploring an idea of a colony outside England that would embrace and reflect his own views — a place other second sons just like him could call home. He flirted with the idea of establishing such a colony — which he envisioned as a farming community where out-of-work second sons whose job opportunities had been limited by the same economic recession that had caused turmoil in the U.S. — in New Zealand and other places before hooking up with Smith.
Hughes had never visited America before 1870. Once he did, as part of a speaking tour, he became enchanted with the relatively new country, with its abundant opportunity. And when the group of Boston investors saw their idea of a settlement for out-of-work New Englanders failing, they turned to Hughes . . . and Hughes saw opportunity.
“He thought (locating his colony) in America might be a good way to unite the North and the South,” said George Zepp, a Rugby resident and volunteer who maintains the archives for Historic Rugby, the non-profit that is dedicated to preserving the colony’s history. “With America being a new country, there were lots of opportunity with wide open land and adventures, and the British had money to invest because of their empire.”
In 1878, the deal closed — Hughes and his business partners, which included fellow British attorneys Sir Henry Kimber and John Boyle, had purchased the Board of Aid. They maintained the office in Boston, opened a second office in London, and began formalizing plans for a new utopia for the second sons of English gentry.
The Board of Aid closed on 35,000 acres of property in 1879, at a cost of 20 cents to $2 per acre. Plans were immediately made to sell the land to settlers for 25 cents to up to $25 per acre.
Over the next few years, the fledgling community thrived, with buildings and homes springing up in Morgan County as well as across White Oak Creek in Scott County. At its peak, more than 400 colonists called this new land home, and it even led directly to the settlement of a new railroad town in Scott County — Elgin. And, contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t just English settlers who migrated here; a number of Americans from the Boston area wound up on the Cumberland Plateau, after all. Today, the signage placed by Historic Rugby reflects the fact that it was an “English and American” colony.
Originally called Plateau Town, the new settlement quickly underwent a name change. Hughes sought a name that would better reflect the homeland from which many of the settlers were arriving and settled on naming it after his former school — Rugby.
[Editor’s Note — Forgotten Times is presented the fourth week of each month in the Independent Herald by United Cumberland Bank. Part II of the continuing feature on the history of Rugby, Tenn., will turn its focus to the rise of the British settlement and how it, in turn, led to the rise of Elgin in the next Forgotten Times feature, appearing in the Aug. 27, 2015, edition of the Independent Herald. Thank you to Rugby historian George Zepp for his assistance.]