Rugby was advertised to potential settlers in both England and the United States. This idealized image of an agrarian utopia, originally published in an 1880 article by Harper’s Weekly, was included in an 1885 promotional booklet, The Rugby Handbook of the English-American Colony on the plateau of the Cumberland Mountains.
Rugby, located in north-central Tennessee’s Morgan County, was the utopian dream of Thomas Hughes (1822-1896), an English judge, reformer, and novelist. Funds to establish the village came from the sales of Hughes’s novel, Tom Brown’s School Days (1857)Rugby attracted around 200 people in 1880 and by 1884 had around 400 residents. At its peak, the village in rural Tennessee had a newspaper, stores, a school, church, and a 7,000 volume library.
To learn more about the history of utopian communities, see Discovering Quacks, Utopias, and Cemeteries: Modern Lessons from Historical Themes
Image courtesy of Internet Archive.