One of Rugby’s most celebrated events is back for 2016. On Saturday, April 23, Historic Rugby will hold one of the largest historic building tours in East Tennessee, providing visitors a unique look inside the life and architecture of the 1880s.
The Historic Rugby Pilgrimage will feature tours of 19 historic buildings and private homes open to the public for tours. Interpreters and homeowners will be on hand to share the history of the structures and the people who have used them. The buildings include the 7,000-volume Hughes Library that has been virtually unchanged since 1882, founder Thomas Hughes’ English Rural style cottage Kingstone Lisle, Carpenter Gothic Christ Church Episcopal and the 1907 rural schoolhouse.
Rugby residents will open their Victorian style homes, showcasing unique period furnishings and a myriad of creative decorating ideas. Visitors will be conveniently shuttled between destinations.
In addition, Historic Rugby will be featuring its newly remodeled Harrow Road Café, with new breakfast, lunch and dinner menus. A special event menu will be offered at dinner during Pilgrimage.
To make reservations for the Pilgrimage, call 423-628-2441, or email rugbyeducation@highland.net. To buy tickets online, visit www.historicrugby.org. Pilgrimage hours are 10am (private residences open at noon) to 6 p.m. Eastern/9-5 Central. Tickets are $15 for adults or $8 for students grades K-12.
For visitors needed lodging, Rugby offers three choices with an authentic appeal. The restored Pioneer Cottage can accommodate up to eight people in a rustic atmosphere. Thomas Hughes stayed at this very spot on his first visit to the colony. Nearby is the rebuilt Percy Cottage that can accommodate up to five guests. For those interested in a bit more elegance, the restored Newbury House inn offers six Victorian furnished bedrooms, a large guest parlor, verandah and sunroom overlooking a pond. Newbury was Rugby’s first boarding house when it was built in 1880.
Rugby, founded in 1880 as a British-American utopian village, is just off State Scenic Hwy. 52, sixteen miles southeast of Jamestown and 35 miles from either Interstate 40 or I-75 in western East Tennessee. To learn more, visit historicrugby.org.