Let the Spirits Move You

I first visited Historic Rugby, a remote community hidden like a secret among the forested hills of Middle Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau, in September of 2014. It was late summer but I could smell autumn. The first leaves had begun to fall in flurries. Walking dirt and gravel paths, I came upon mist hanging over fields and graveyards, obscuring the cupolas of Victorian houses that had stood on the same wood foundations since the 1800s. I considered what it means to call somewhere haunted. The word doesn’t always pertain to spirits. It can speak of memories. Residue of past lives and events can linger like fog in the hollows of mountains, in the lees of fieldstone chimneys centuries old. Whether or not you believe in ghosts, from the moment you pass the signpost marking Rugby’s boundaries you can feel all the ways in which this quiet Gothic village is haunted.

In fact, Historic Rugby has been called the most haunted town in America. During my stay at Newbury House, a bed-and-breakfast that has offered travelers rest since the village was founded in 1880, I was unsettled by more than one unexplained incident. But that’s another tale. This one is more about the sense of a place than its ghosts. I was invited to Rugby to read from my second novel, Long Man, as part of the town’s annual writer series. Rugby has a thriving arts scene for a small community, which is no surprise given its origins. When I learned the village was founded by the writer Thomas Hughes, whose mother was a friend of Charles Dickens, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard of it before. 

As a boy growing up in Oxfordshire, England, in the 1830s, while attending Rugby School, Hughes was influenced by the progressive teachings of his headmaster Thomas Arnold. The Christian socialist ideals he’d learned at Rugby School, under the tutelage of Arnold, inspired his 1857 novel, Tom Brown’s School Days, as well as the name of the colony he would eventually cross the ocean to establish in the idyllic mountains of Tennessee. Hughes envisioned a utopian colony where the “second sons” of the English gentry could escape the primogeniture, in which the eldest sons inherited all of the family’s land, and the economic depression of their mother country. In this new Rugby, they would have a chance not only to own land, but to make their own rules based on Christian socialism rather than the Victorian materialism that ruled the day in 19th-century England.

As it turned out, the pampered sons of the English gentry didn’t fare too well in our hardscrabble mountains. They weren’t accustomed to the backbreaking labor it took to wrest crops from the rocky soil of the Cumberland Plateau. On top of their exhaustion, in 1881 a typhoid epidemic struck the struggling colony. By 1887, most of the colonists had either died or given up and gone back home. While the village was later resurrected and preserved as a historic district by the National Register of Historic Places, it’s those first colonists whose legacies, if not their ghosts, seem to haunt Rugby.

Exploring the town, you see what they built: Christ Church with its Gothic spire nestled in a copse of woods, its reed organ one of the oldest in the country. Kingstone Lisle, Hughes’s Queen Anne summer cottage, where I sat at his massive oak desk and tried to soak up whatever remained of his literary presence. Rugby Printing Works, where I was able to read one of the village’s original newspapers. The Thomas Hughes Library, Rugby’s most unchanged Victorian structure, where I donned white gloves and turned the yellowed leaves of some of its 7,000 pristine volumes, the earliest dating back to the 1600s. And Laurel Dale Cemetery, where Hughes’s mother, Margaret, is buried alongside those 1881 typhoid victims, their bones lying to this day thousands of miles from where they were born. What courage the colonists had, to undertake such an endeavor, to dream of a utopia. It’s hard to call those “second sons” failures when you experience Rugby.

Having grown up on an ancestral farm in East Tennessee, surrounded by hills pocked with arrowheads, descended from Scots-Irish dissenters who fled oppression to make their own rules in this forbidding but beautiful landscape, I know what it means to take off your shoes and feel the soil courageous men and women died to settle seeping up between your toes. 

I felt that same sense of place when I set foot for the first time inside Rugby’s Thomas Hughes Library. I stood among its history-laden shelves and said out loud, “I want to write here.” I didn’t just mean the library. I meant the whole village. I wanted to re-create on paper the scents of mist and woods and water, to get the color of the cloud-streaked sky over the schoolhouse bell just right. I wanted to lie under the churchyard trees with my notebook. I wanted to sit in the gazebo down by the lake or on the low stone graveyard wall and see what spirit would move my pen. In Historic Rugby, it feels possible to commune with all manner of spirits, including the creative one within.