A cluster of Victorian English houses is an unexpected sight along a rural two-lane Tennessee road. With gingerbread and gables, they look like imports from a Charles Dickens novel. In fact, Rugby was an unexpected Tennessee town as its architecture looks today.
The Rugby Colony was founded as a high-minded attempt to right social wrongs: the utopian community would provide a home and work for the "second sons" of the English gentry and it would reject late Victorian materialism in favor of the Christian socialist ideals of equality and cooperation.