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Rugby’s wild story starts with a British utopia
Somewhere on the Cumberland Plateau, about 90 minutes northwest of Knoxville, a Victorian English village sits in the Tennessee woods. Christ Church steeple rises above the trees.
Carpenter Gothic cottages line quiet lanes. A library full of 19th-century books waits behind an original wooden door.
About 70 people still live here, and the place looks almost exactly as it did in 1880. The story of how it got here, and why it nearly disappeared, is the part that keeps you reading.
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A British author tried to build a perfect society in rural Tennessee
In 1880, British author and social reformer Thomas Hughes sailed to America with an idea…