Special Collections Lecture Series

Appalachian Removals and Relocations:
Relocations to Appalachian East Tennessee: Significant Communities Formed by Migrating Groups

Rugbians Tuesday, March 27
"Nineteenth-Century Come-Heres:
Planting Intentional Communities in the Rocky Soil of Tennessee"

Benita Howell, UT anthropology professor emeritus

Podcast of this lecture (What is a podcast?)

Relocations, or migrations, into East Tennessee by large groups from the British Isles and continental Europe mark the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Welsh of Scott, Morgan, and Anderson Counties; the Swiss of Franklin, Grundy, and Lewis Counties; and the Germans of Morgan County, centered upon Wartburg; are significant examples. Manuscripts in Special Collections include papers documenting the lives of the people in these colonies.

Two other relocations into East Tennessee are of particular interest because settlers established utopian communities. Rugby, in Morgan County, was an experimental village founded by second sons of upper class English families, in search of an idyllic aristocratic agrarian life in the New World. The Ruskin Co-operative, or Commonwealth, in Dickson County, was a socialist experiment.

Neither of these two communities succeeded in fulfilling the ambition that drove their establishment. However, the dreams of each for a better life in Southern Appalachia have left distinctive legacies on the land. Today, historic Rugby lives on as a museum village and community shaped by the vision of its founders.