Thomas Hughes Public Library

I did some library time travel while in Rugby, Tennessee. As soon as we stepped inside the Thomas Hughes Library, we were transported to a library from more than a century ago. The furnishings and the 7,000 volume collection (donated to Hughes from various publishers) are original to this 1882 building. It’s a model of preservation. The books are in great shape! Apparently, there are several floors under the floor we walked on, and those have worked wonders in absorbing the moisture over the years.

Thomas Hughes established the Rugby colony in the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee in 1880. His vision of a utopian society included a cooperative, class-free society with a strong agricultural base and flavorings of English culture. He insisted on building a library which became the pride of the colony. So committed to libraries was Hughes that he helped found the Chicago Public Library in the 1870s after the great Chicago fire. CPL still has a Thomas Hughes Children’s Library.

Hughes is the author of Tom Brown’s School Days based on his experiences attending Rugby School in England. His earnings from the book largely underwrote his investment in the Rugby colony. The colony was only sustainable for about a decade and Hughes was hardly ever there to manage the day-to-day realities, but the utopian community building efforts live on.

An interesting tidbit: the first librarian, a German man, actually made house calls to collect overdue books.