Historic Rugby, Tennessee

On a recent road trip, Peter and I took a detour to visit the site of late 19th-century Rugby, where Thomas Hughes (author of, among other works, Tom Brown's Schooldays) envisioned a classless paradise. Driving into Historic Rugby on highway 52 from the west gives a sense of the remoteness of the place, as the winding road leads through wooded hills, and then the small towns of Jamestown, Allardt, and Armathwaite across the last 15 miles. It is, in places, as pastoral as the 19th-century colonists hoped for, with herds of cattle, yards with horses and donkeys, and a few classically inspired houses suggesting a certain desire for gentility among more modest farm dwellings. After driving from Nashville (Nash-Vegas?) in the morning, Rugby’s own Victorian style seemed almost shockingly quaint and the grounds park-like. Historic Rugby’s own website describes the place as “Nestled among tall pines and oaks” while two scholarly writers use the only slightly less adorable term “tucked away” to describe its placement on the landscape.

The first part of the guided tour of Rugby – the only way to see the historic site – is a 20 minute video called “The Power of a Dream,” which introduces the origin of the colony with a focus on author and founder, Thomas Hughes’, vision for the place, and his mother and niece’s personal involvement. It also explains the early development of Rugby as an historic site, with Brian Stagg’s personal commitment to preserving the place - a torch taken up and enlivened by his sister, Barbara, following his death at a young age. True to its title, the film emphasizes Hughes’ dream of an opportunity for a noble, class-free agriculturally-based life for the second sons of wealthy English fathers who weren’t destined to inherit any land and lived on limited funds or allowances – in Canada we called these fellows “remittance men,” and the story goes that many of them settled in the western provinces with their strings of polo ponies, planning to become gentleman farmers and ranchers. This is one particular aspect of Rugby which sets it apart from some other late 19th- and early 20th- century communities who aimed at leveling class difference –Rugby wasn’t intended so much to elevate the status and improve the lot of working-classes, but to offer an opportunity for previously upper- and middle- class folks to pursue an honest living on the land without the stigma of a lower-class occupation. Tracing the early days of the Colony through a typhoid epidemic, agricultural failures, and a destructive fire in their single productive business, the Tabard Inn, “The Power of a Dream” maintains that the dream was what held the colony together through difficult times of the past and what informs the current local residents and site managers to preserve and interpret Rugby in the present. It’s hard to argue with the power of this dream today, as the theatre itself is an impressive facility with the names of many individual donors posted on seats. Rugby’s dream-fueled presentation of history continued after the film, when the interpreter led our group to the 30 foot mural of Rugby as it was in the 1880’s – or at least as we would like to imagine it. The interpreter admitted that the artist rotated some buildings on the landscape to be facing the observer, so as to make them more recognizable. I guess utopias aren’t bound by conventions of representation we expect of the rest of the world – in imagining, creating, and remembering them.

After leaving the visitor center, the first building we toured was “Kingston Lisle,” an 1884 house built to be Thomas Hughes’ summer home. Here, more than anywhere else at the site, we realize that the community’s intellectual and practical founder spent relatively little time AT Rugby, and ultimately intended to use it just as a summer retreat (so the question looms, who was at Rugby, and what were they doing here?) Kingston Lisle is a beautiful little house, with unpainted wood paneled walls and furnishings almost entirely from this and other colony homes. This is one of the most impressive aspects of Historic Rugby today – the sheer volume of original artifacts populating the place. And they’re not locked into a conservation center or behind light filtering glass, but laying on top of tables and desks so that the interpreter can pick up, and show us Thomas Hughe’s shirt collars. Perhaps it doesn’t make complete sense that Hughes would store his shirt collars on his desk in one of the front rooms of the house, or that what appear to be farriers’ tools are on the kitchen shelves alongside the other household gadgets. Maybe it doesn’t matter – this is an historic site dedicated to presenting a utopian colony, not to representing the details of daily Victorian life… or is it? Here is where one of the tensions arises that I regularly see in museum presentations about intentional and utopian communities – whether the site or display is concerned with the differences and specifics of life among people who sought to separate themselves from mainstream society, or if it is dedicated more to presenting a broader view of what life was like (for everyone) in the period in question. Most sites tend toward the latter, focusing on a comfortable old-timeyness (root cellars, woodstoves, semi-detached kitchens and the like) with occasional culture-shocks for the youngsters (chamber pots) and the Kingston Lisle house at Rugby is in this group. One area of interest they do emphasize is the “Englishness” of many of the settlers – our guide mentioned that, at Christmas they fire-up the kitchen stove to steam plum puddings, and pointed out a “tongue-press” for preparing this British meat favourite. Rugby also has an annual festival of “British and Appalachian Culture” where I bet they don’t serve cold tongue sandwiches while playing lawn tennis!

After a brief stop at the pretty 1887 Christ Church, we walked over to the unquestionable highlight of our tour of Historic Rugby – Thomas Hughes’ 1882 Public Library. Intentionally frozen in time to a pre-1900 state, this ca. 7000 volume collection has books about topics from spiritualism to science and phrenology to philosophy on its packed, ceiling high shelves. With many barely-used first editions donated by publishers in the early 1880s it’s a book enthusiast’s dream. It’s also the single most evocative artifact in Rugby’s interpretation of Hughes’ utopian vision. Residents of the colony were ideally supposed to work a full day in the fields or shops (making an honest living on the land) and then spend their leisure hours expanding their intellects with reading and stimulating discussion. The lending library’s extant borrowers’ records would offer a fascinating look into members’ individual interests and pursuits, and I wouldn’t be surprised if at least one paper has been written on this material… I’ll be searching the web for it. We ended the tour at a small museum in the old school-house building, with reproductions of photographs and documents from both the colony’s days at Rugby and the subsequent years of occupation and restoration. While drawn from a great documentary collection, this facility’s displays seemed a little pale as we still basked in the excitement of Hughes’ library. Maybe it would be better seen first?

There is much more I could write about Rugby – including my curiosity about women in the community and the eventual fate of Hughes’ spirited photographer niece, Emily; about Rugby’s ongoing growth as historically sensitive private homes are built on house-lots planned by the original community; and about our enjoyable and informative visit at the Newbury House Bed and Breakfast with Bruce, the husband of site director, Barbara Stagg’s late first-cousin, his friend, Dolores, and later Barbara and her husband, John. Bruce told us the amusing story of how part of Rugby’s economic plan was to grow and can tomatoes – there was even a packaging label designed – but the colonists couldn’t grow any tomatoes. As we drove out of the hills cradling Rugby, I felt a little sad that the remoteness of the place – which is what has helped preserve it so well – will prevent me from visiting again soon to explore all the questions I still have.

End of the Line

I doubt there's an archaeologist out there who hasn't had the experience of finding something inconveniently large, interesting, or important on the last day of a field project. Sometimes we race to uncover and record it, other times we build it into the next stage of research proposals, and yet others it becomes part of the Future Research section of our reports. Right now, this spring's Last Day Odd Thing is serving, to me, as a metaphor for the archaeological and historical research process.

I had originally planned to open a 2m x 2m unit to test a magnetic anomaly that showed up in the results of last autumn's gradiometer survey. We weren't going to have time for that – the ground was really hard and excavation was moving steadily but slowly – so I decided to use the metal detector to check the anomaly location for a big, ferrous object (this convergence had occurred in a previous unit). There was indeed a strong signal from the metal detector right in the location of the anomaly – and I started a shovel-test to open a small window into the spot. The first thing I found was a robust, wrought iron hook… connected to a thick iron ring… connected to a strand of wire rope… I followed the cable for a few looping feet as it snaked next to the hook… and then it dove deeper into the ground for an indeterminate distance… which is when I decided that shovel tests can only really be *so* large before they turn into full-blown excavation units, which should be screened, mapped, etc… so I took several photos and covered the thing back up again in its place.

So, what is it? My best guess is the obvious – that it's part of an apparatus for pulling or dragging something. This isn't particularly surprising. There's even an 1891 receipt in the Kaweah Cooperative Colony Records in the Bancroft Library for 1000' of steel rope, purchased from John A. Roebling's Sons Co., of San Francisco. And what's on the other end of the cable? I don't know. This is the part that makes me reflect on the processes of research and discovery in every stage of historical archaeology. There are a lot of leads out there. Ideally, we want to follow all of them to their fullest extent, uncovering the threads and finding out what's tied to the end. But we always have to decide where to focus our attention… do we follow a single thread to the exclusion of everything around it and then backtrack to pick up the other ones we passed along the way? Do we follow many threads, simultaneously, methodically, an inch at a time?

Nickel!

This made us all smile like goofballs. The date is the really exciting part, as it suggests that (unless someone was carrying this around as a memento longer than a coin's normal circulation) that it belonged to a colony member. Now, people carry pockets full of change and drop money all the time, right? But what if you lived in a colony who had the philosophical goal of obliterating the cash economy and you couldn't exchange this nickel for anything for miles around?

Tell all your Three Rivers Friends!

Getting the excavation underway!

The population of the project grew this weekend from me and my dissertation (who, I wish, had its own room sometimes) to include volunteers Miriam Lueck and Chris Avery from Berkeley, Kathleen Kubal and Chris Lloyd from Sonoma State, Trish Wittenstein and Rita Pena from Three Rivers (pictured here), a surprise visit from Peter, and an overnight visit from my academic advisor, Laurie Wilkie, and her husband and daughter. Three 2m x 2m units are open, and we've started finding machine-cut nails and a couple of fragments of glass and one of porcelain in the second level – which means that this season's excavations thus far (only five days along, mind you) are confirming what I already suspected about the site – that it contains a dispersed scatter of artifacts dating to the colony occupation, and that interesting diagnostic artifacts will be few and far between. Laurie and Paul found a few fragments of ceramic over the edge of a gulch near the site, but otherwise there isn't any evidence of a substantial trash dump nearby.

The cows haven't visited the site again in any force, but we did have the honour of meeting the local fire department (who was responding to a call that we had campfires on the site – someone saw the dust flying from our screens and thought it was smoke), a couple of Sheriff's department volunteers, the rancher who leases the land and his delightful canines, and a local neighbour with a passion for Native California sites. For such a seemingly remote place, there is a lot of traffic along North Fork Drive and many folks slow right down as they pass us, trying to figure out just what we're up to.

Raising Stakes

I visited the site this morning for the first time since last fall, and my first task was to conduct the archaeology of last season's archaeology. I needed to find the wooden stakes we pounded into the ground last year to mark 10m intervals in the huge imaginary-cum-physical grid that makes spatial sense of the data we collect from the site. All of the shovel tests from last March, the excavation units and metal-detector blocks from June, and the magnetometer data from October are tied into this grid to relate them to one another and to the local landscape. This season's excavation units will also be placed and numbered according to the grid.

And cattle don't respect the grid. Through the rainy winter and spring, the family who leases the land where I work kept some long-horns on it – they're still there, but in the shady spots now – and their hooves gutted and rutted the surface of the site, breaking and knocking down many of the numbered wooden stakes that we had pounded as deep as we could into the ground until our arms ached.

Writing in archaeology, we like to use the word "negotiate" to describe the imbalances and relationships that the subjects of our study worked within. We like to see the people of the past as negotiating through systems of meaning, power, and knowledge… and I think we like to think this way, in part, because every step of the practice of what we do involves shared spaces and some kind of negotiation… with landowners, stakeholders, one another, with time and site formation processes, with topography and vegetation, and with mud and cattle. I've never thought of what I do as Science, and today even my notions that we use scientific techniques in our data collection are wobbling.

If I recreate the grid from the points remaining, it will be close enough but it won't be exactly the same grid. Of course, there are brilliant technologies designed to solve such problems of inaccuracy as cattle-knocking-over-stakes and tapes-catching-on-thistles. A late-model GPS unit can give an acceptably accurate location for a site datum, and laser surveying instruments can help to both establish a grid and to map data collection locations and topography. We'll be using the latter very soon for site mapping, but it wasn't available to me when I needed to establish spatial order… so we created that order with tapes, stakes, and trigonometry.

And so today I stubbornly re-measured and re-hammered the stakes necessary for finding where the excavation units go. I'm looking forward to recording the tape-and-stake grid with the laser transit later in the month, and negotiating through the differences between this new imaginary reality and the old imaginary one, and trying to make it all apply to a grassy slope where cows live on top of history.

Away from the Bay

I'm in "The Field" until June 9 working on my dissertation research, a.k.a. the Kaweah Colony Archaeology Project, so while I'm out here this is going to be the site of my fieldwork weblog. My welcome to Tulare County was last-night's community meeting in Three Rivers, where the two candidates for county sheriff answered the public's questions about gangs, drugs, and dangerously slow law enforcement response times to rural emergencies. The most memorable thing I heard come out of the current sheriff's mouth, in response to a question about concealed weapons permits, was "This is a gun-toting county. We're not San Francisco."

I'm staying in a cabin with no phone line or wireless coverage, and will be uploading posts from nine miles down the road at the Three Rivers Cyber Café. Hopefully I'll keep it up.

Visiting Utopia in Oregon

During a recent road-trip through Oregon we paid a second visit to the Aurora Colony Museum, which presents and interprets the history of a group of German Christians whose communal settlement flourished under the leadership of William Keil between 1856 and 1877. The museum occupies a remodeled Ox Barn offset from the nucleus of the town's cluster of antique shops, for which Aurora is more widely known. Two galleries house a collection of colony artifacts largely donated by descendant and local families. When I asked if there were published guidelines of colony philosophy, the docent simply pointed to one of these artifacts – a lithograph (I believe, designed to look like hand embroidery) reading "Love One Another."

The organizing principles of the community were described by Charles Nordhoff (1875) in his published account Aurora, which is available on the museum's website. However I found little else in the museum itself to suggest how colonists operationalized these guidelines and how Keil maintained control and organization until his 1877death. The Aurora Colony museum's extensive outreach program focuses, rather, on the daily tasks and travails of the colony's residents in the late 19^th century. Spinning and quilting events appeal to adult visitors, while a Farm Program for school children teaches 'pioneer skills' – from chopping wood to dipping candles. This is indeed a valuable contribution to the kids' education about Western history – but what does it teach about communal societies?

It is my observation that colonies for which daily practice of faith – including ritual dress, dining, behavior, and church attendance – are today more successfully interpreted in terms of their communal qualities than those with fewer regular reaffirmations of membership. Members of the Amana Colonies and Ephrata Cloister, for example, attended daily religious services and observed specific codes of dress. At these communities' museums today, it is impossible to mistake the fundamental difference of colony members, as communalists and religious observers, from the settlements surrounding them.

The question arises that, how should, or how can historic sites and museums related to intentional/utopian communities portray the degrees of difference their subjects attempted to achieve? These groups were often actively engaged in rejection or critique of a larger cultural system, which is , more often than not a precursor to the cultural milieu of both the museum and its visitors. It may be time to explore better ways to present "alternative histories" to broad audiences – focusing not on how colonies and communalists represented the pioneering values we hold as the cornerstones of modern Western society, but instead how they attempted to set history on a different trajectory.

More pictures of our visits to Aurora, taken by Peter Merholz, can be found here.