the community of Elgin to the east. The area is relatively remote, with the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area dominating the area to the north, and sparsely-populated rolling hills stretching for miles to the south. Most of the historic district is located on or near Tennessee state highway 52. A more modern residential area is located in the Beacon Hill section on the north side of the community. History Establishment Thomas Hughes was born in Uffington, Oxfordshire, England in 1822. In the 1830s, he attended the Rugby School in Rugby, Warwickshire, where he was greatly influenced by the school's progressive headmaster, Thomas Arnold. Both Rugby School and Arnold figured prominently in Hughes's 1857 novel, Tom Brown's School Days, and the school would eventually be the namesake for Hughes's utopian colony in Tennessee. In Tom Brown's School Days, Hughes espoused the ideals of Christian socialism, namely the cooperative ownership of community businesses. By the 1860s, Hughes had grown disenchanted with the materialism of late Victorian England. He was disheartened by the fact that the talents of many of England's younger sons were wasted due to an economic recession and the medieval system of primogeniture, in which the oldest son inherited all of the family's land. In 1870, Hughes traveled to America to meet his friend, the poet James Russell Lowell, and learned of the Boston-based Board of Aid to Land Ownership, which specialized in helping unemployed urban craftsmen relocate to rural areas. Hughes indicated that such an operation might also be beneficial to young, unemployed English gentry. In 1878, Board of Aid president Franklin Webster Smith and an agent with the new Cincinnati Southern Railway, Cyrus Clarke, were travelling on the railroad's new tracks along the Cumberland Plateau when they identified the future site of Rugby, and were impressed with its virgin forests, clear air, and scenic gorges. Clarke secured options on hundreds of thousands of acres of Plateau land. Knoxville attorney Oliver Perry Temple, who became the colony's legal and agricultural advisor, began the complicated process of securing land titles. Smith returned to Boston to recruit families to move to the newly acquired land on the Plateau, but economic conditions in the northeast had improved, and few families were interested in relocating. Smith then notified Hughes of the Board's new land acquisitions, and Hughes expressed interest in establishing a colony. Hughes formed a partnership with British lawyers