Trees

Tom Brown's School Days is a book more people have heard of than read. Its author, Thomas Hughes, was Englis has a mutton chop. Chief interests of his life were cricket and Utopia.

In 1880, around a tract of land which he had bought in northeastern Tennessee, Utopia-hunting Tom Hughes founded a colony. Invited to join were the younger sons of English gentlemen, who were barred by tradition from inheritance, by custom from working for their living. The colony was named Rugby after Tom Hughes's old school, and more than 1,000 younger sons saw an opportunity, came from England to the U. S., where it was no shame to work.

A London barrister, an idealist, but no businessman, pink-faced Tom Hughes set the younger sons to laying out cricket fields, tennis courts, organizing a Rugby football team, dramatic societies, a cornet band. In the Tennessee mountains old English homes sprang up, a "Tabard Inn," a church, a library which included a practically complete set of Hughes first editions, a rare Dickens item, pamphlets by the younger Pitt, the entire series of Illustrator Kate Greenaway. Tom Hughes's mother moved there, lived out her life in "Uffington House." But Tom Hughes's wife thought the whole thing was silly. She insisted that he return to England.

There, he settled down to a judgeship, and never went back to Utopia.

For three years after its founder deserted, the Tennessee Utopia lasted. Then typhoid fever, the rigors of manual labor, and an alien soil thinned the colonists' ranks. Only a handful stayed, and Rugby crumbled away into sleepy decadence while the Tennessee pines sprouted on the cricket field, hid the little church.

Fifty years later Lumberman George T. Webb heard about these pines, took a look, last September bought up the stock of the Rugby Land Co. for $15,000. Soon his loggers began to fell the timber on the outskirts of the tract, getting closer & closer to the little village, until one pine crashed across the church fence. Aroused, tree lovers, historians, librarians of Tennessee, the few surviving Rugbyans protested. To their appeal for help, Congressman Bruce Barton of New York, who was born nine 'miles from Rugby, wired earnestly but distantly: "Only God can make a tree and it takes Him over 100 years." To the Chattanooga Woman's Press Club, Secretary of State Cordell Hull was less aloof: "Assuming that the trees are the ones that I know, I join with you ... in earnestly urging that they shall not be destroyed."

Woodman Webb said he would spare the trees for 30 days, to give Rugby's friends time to buy the land back. His price, including the trees: $60,000.

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