Victorian Utopia : Destination: Tennessee : The dream of a class-free society died, but it left a village of enduring beauty

Like so many visitors to the historic utopian colony of Rugby, my husband and I began our experience with the turning of the brass doorbell at Newbury House.

One hundred and fifteen years ago, in 1880, travelers and prospective colonists from Britain and the New World gathered in this demure wood guest house with its sloping French roof and resolutely American porch. They came to northeastern Tennessee to inspect the infant British-American colony of 120 that had been established by Thomas Hughes, an English social reformer and author of the classic novel “Tom Brown’s School Days.”

In the late 1870s, Hughes had felt “a secret touch of compassion” for Britain’s “Will Wimbles,” the second sons of the gentry who had neither land nor prospects at home. For a solution, he looked to America, specifically the forest wilderness of the Cumberland Plateau, where he believed the “Will Wimbles” might lead a life of honest physical labor and cultivated leisure. They’d exchange their stovepipe hats and frock coats for flannels, breeches and gaiters. At Newbury House, or from the rough lodgings at Pioneer Cottage (built in 1879), they’d begin a new life in this “enchanted solitude.”

Today, Newbury House is a place of peanut-butter brownies, shortbread cookies and grand opera. Lodging manager Pearl Nester takes care to provide every luxury for her visitors (21 can stay overnight at Rugby), denying them only the comforting illusions of television. As she led us to our room--with its high, hard bed covered by lacework and its rustic wood furniture--my husband and I peered into the lodgings next door. There we spotted a motorcycle helmet and black leather boots among the Victorian coverlets and polished wood. Like us, our biker neighbor had chosen a front room with large windows facing a tree-dotted, expansive green.

On this languid September afternoon, the swing seat on the covered porch of Newbury House beckoned. Nevertheless, we hastened to the visitors center in the historic (1907) schoolhouse, where a guide informed us that our tour would begin.

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The schoolhouse is an appropriate gathering place for visitors to Rugby, as Thomas Hughes believed passionately in the power of education to correct social inequality. At the English Rugby School, in Warwickshire, in the Midlands region, Hughes had studied under the celebrated educational reformer Thomas Arnold, who advocated the opening of England’s exclusive private schools to the common people. In Rugby, Tenn.--the school’s namesake--Hughes wished to bring together Americans and Europeans of all classes for their mutual benefit. In a small way, our tour group of day visitors and lodgers from Canada, the United States and Britain fulfilled his vision.

The Thomas Hughes Library was built in 1882 on Central Avenue, the colony’s main street. It seems to embody all of the hope--and hopelessness--of Hughes’ ambitions for Rugby. Painted white, with a semicircular window and a tiny but soaring spire, the library stands like a dwarf temple of learning among a tall grove of trees. English and American publishers donated most of the 7,000 original books to Hughes for his colonists: British private schoolmen, but also natives of Tennessee and other Americans of varying rank and education. Here, in the cane-bottom captain’s chairs, by the polished walnut reading table, the Rugbians found diversion after a day in the fields. They were dirty and tired, sometimes drunk on “intoxicating liquors,” according to Hughes’ book about the colony, “Rugby, Tennessee” (Macmillan and Co., 1881, now out of print). Liquor was forbidden at Rugby. Colonists were meant to imbibe the classics of Victoriana, such as the three books “Thrift,” “Duty,” and “Character” by Samuel Smiles and Oliver Wendell Holmes’ “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.” Being of worldly inclination, they also read Punch, Illustrated London News and The Rugbian, the colony’s renowned newspaper.

By the time we’d left the library, my husband and I were eager to explore on our own. In its management of the site, Historic Rugby Inc., emulates Hughes’ model of Christian socialism: private and public ownership of the site combined with both restricted and free access. At Laurel Dale Cemetery and the Gentlemen’s Swimming Hole, and throughout the highways and byways of the colony, we could roam free. The privately owned homes, such as Wren’s Nest (1887) and Ruralia (1884), we could inspect from the path or road only. To visit the interiors of the library, Christ Church and Hughes’ cottage of Kingstone Lisle, we required a guide.

Since it was built in 1887 on Central Avenue opposite the library, Christ Church Episcopal has attracted believers. Every Sunday a congregation gathers to heed the words of the preacher and absorb the notes of the rosewood organ. We utopians followed our guide into this inner sanctum of Hughes’ vision.

In pale salmon, burgundy and gray, the church combines the rose window and bell spire of a grand British cathedral with the steeply pitched roof of an Alpine ski chalet--the whole lovingly rendered in miniature. “The style is Carpenter Gothic,” explained our guide as we sat in the pews. “Carpenter, because it’s made from wood, and Gothic, because of the pointed arches.” She gestured toward the arched windows lining the nave. From the gentle angle of the sun piercing the colored glass, we could see it was already late afternoon.

By the time my husband and I had emerged from Christ Church, visitors were beginning to leave the colony. We collected our car at Newbury House and drove east to Laurel Dale Cemetery. To travel Donnington Road to Laurel Dale is to recall many of Rugby’s most tragic and irreversible events. Along the tree-lined route, small markers commemorate the sites of the Tabard Inn, twice destroyed by fire, and the Maisonette, where victims of the 1881 typhoid outbreak received care.

Now overgrown by weeds and grass, the empty lot of the Tabard has become the wilderness of the colony; the former wilderness surrounding it, a tidy enclave of lawns and houses. Yet the Tabard was once a resort of great renown: “A sightly building, with deep verandas prettily latticed . . . [affording] glimpses through the trees of magnificent ranges of blue forest-covered mountains,” according to Hughes. Alongside its English garden of watermelons, cabbages and lima beans sprouted a formal dress code, a tradition of croquet and tennis parties, and a clientele that included dignitaries from America and abroad. It’s one of Rugby’s many ironies that the cemetery has outlived the inn.

My husband and I walked among the gravestones. Birth and death of the colony are chronicled here. A small stone covered with daddy longlegs marks the short life of one of Rugby’s firstborn: Grace Dimling/Born Sept. 25, 1884/ Died Sept. 29, 1885/A little flower of love/That blossomed but to die . . . Nearby lies a more substantial granite stone between old juniper and oak trees. This is the grave of Margaret E. Hughes, mother to Thomas and his brother Hastings, also a resident of the colony: Erected/by her sons/in memory of a true/and loving life/of 90 years. With Margaret’s death on Oct. 5, 1887, the seventh anniversary of Rugby, the young colony began its final decline.

Thomas Hughes had lived at Rugby only for short periods. But he had not forsaken Rugby by choice; his wife and children stubbornly refused to visit the colony, let alone live there. It was Hughes’ mother, Margaret, an octogenarian, who took up residence in the Tennessee woods in 1881. Under her tutelage, the colony peaked in 1884 with 450 residents and more than 70 buildings; the primroses and lilies of the valley from Margaret’s English garden took root in the Tennessee woods and flourished.

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In the 1990s, the setting for meals is the Harrow Road Cafe, on weeknights before 6 p.m. At 5:45 p.m., my husband and I left Laurel Dale in a panic, fearful that we’d be turned away from the only eatery for miles. On his first visit to Rugby in fall 1880, Hughes praised the good wholesome fare of the colony: beef and mutton, rice, tomatoes, apple sauce, peach pie and even puddings. The menu at the Harrow Road Cafe takes inspiration from these meals. To our relief, we weren’t too late for shepherd’s pie and peach pie. Even so, our waitress regretfully informed us that we couldn’t have soup and salad. There was none left.

Dusk, a retiring time of day, is kind to visionaries. In this light, innocent of cars and day visitors, the historic colony seemed to bring forth its utopians and call them by name.

At Rugby, Hughes remained true to his vow to protect “this lovely corner of God’s earth.” For his home, he took inspiration from a design by Andrew Jackson Downing, an American architect who advocated the harmony of the natural and the “built” environments. Constructed of simple planks and painted nut brown, the “English Rural” cottage of Kingstone Lisle reflected the color and materials of the surrounding woodland. Hughes spent little time there, but from the small porch he must have heard the rhythm of horse hoofs on Central Avenue and the squealing of stray pigs in the nearby forest.

The woodland trail to the Gentlemen’s Swimming Hole reveals much of the natural beauty Hughes loved in the highlands of the Cumberland Plateau. Beside Laurel Dale Cemetery, the trail begins on a ridge top covered when we were there in crimson and gold oak, maple and tulip poplar. As the path dropped toward the gorge of the clear Fork River, the woods grew dark, spindly and resinous. Here we walked among white pine, holly, hemlock and mountain laurel. Another dip in the trail and we felt the cold damp of sandstone shaded by the giant leaves of the umbrella magnolia. We were alone among the tall trees.

The worn rock and impassive water of the Gentlemen’s Swimming Hole suggest a spot that has long ago retired from time. In the 1880s, though, Tennesseans and Britons, gentry and laborers frolicked by the hole. So great was the pleasure that a similar diversion was planned for the ladies. “When bathing is as good as it is here, it seems horribly selfish for the male animal to engross it all,” wrote The Rugbian of July 16, 1881. It took until 1974, and the creation of the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area, for Rugby to fulfill this promise. The Gentlemen’s Swimming Hole is now officially unisex.

In the words of W.T. Walton, one of Rugby’s final custodians, “Twilight descended upon Rugby in a very short time, and deepened into the shades of night. . . .” Obscurity came through epidemic, drought, land disputes and financial mismanagement. Although some of the “Will Wimbles” adapted well to the new life of rugged seclusion, others pursued hunting, tennis and riding without contributing to the working life of the colony.

In 1892, Hughes was 70. His utopia had cost him much in money, reputation and personal grief. Yet in a letter of Oct. 8, he wrote to the students and teachers of Rugby School: “The memories of my visits will always remain among the evergreen spots of my life.”

In tribute to Hughes, my husband and I left the colony in the full light of morning.

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GUIDEBOOK

In Bluegrass

Utopia

Getting there: Drive to Historic Rugby on Tennessee 52, roughly 125 miles northeast of Nashville and 70 miles northwest of Knoxville. Rugby also is easily accessible by car from either Great Smoky Mountains National Park or the Kentucky bluegrass country. Admission to the site is $4 adults; $2 students and $3.50 seniors.

When to go: Rugby is open year-round; 9:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Mon. through Sat., , 11:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Sun. This year’s annual Rugby Pilgrimage--when some private historic homes open their doors to the public--is Oct. 7 and 8. Christmas at Rugby--candlelight tours, carolers and Victorian dinner at the Harrow Road Cafe--is Dec. 2 and 9.

Where to stay: At Newbury House, private room with private bath, and breakfast for two people, $69 per night; private room with shared bath and breakfast for two, $59. Pioneer and Percy cottages, with full cooking facilities for two, $59, $10 for each additional person. Reservations advised: Pearl Lee Nester, P.O. Box 8, Rugby, TN 37733; telephone the Historic Rugby office (615) 628-2441 or Newbury House (615) 628-2269.

Where to eat: British and American fare available at the Harrow Road Cafe, Rugby Highway, Rugby, TN 37733. Open 8 a.m.-6 p.m. Sun.-Thurs., 8 a.m.-9:30 p.m. Fri. and Sat.; dinner ranges $10-$12 per person; local tel. 628-2350.

For more information: Call or write Historic Rugby Inc., P.O. Box 8, Rugby, TN 37733; tel. (615) 628-2441. Or the Tennessee Department of Tourism Development, P.O. Box 23170, TNDA, Nashville 37202; tel. (800) 836-6200. For details about Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area, call or write Big South Fork NRRA, Route 3, Box 401, Oneida, TN 37841; tel. (615) 879-3625.