RUGBY, Tenn. — Rugby is a small town 75 miles north of Knoxville with a population of less than a hundred people.
It was founded by European author Thomas Hughes in 1880. The town library bearing his name has a catalog of books that outnumber the residents of Rugby nearly 100 to 1.
“5,000 was from the Chicago Public Library. The other 2,000 books came from the colonists that lived here and really just people passing through the area,” Rugby Visitor Center Manager Brian Whitson said.
The library is mostly unchanged from the day it opened, with only seven volumes missing from the original collection. That is until a Christmas book found its way back through the library's doors after 140 years.
“It's called 'Diamond and Rubies' or 'The Home of Santa Claus.' It was written in 1870. It's a small children's book that relates the true meaning of Christmas,” Co-owner of Histories, Highways and Haunts Christy Sumner said. "We have a great partnership with Historic Rugby Incorporated. A friend of ours knew that we have this partnership, so, she returned the book to us because she knew that we would get it into the into the right hands.”
The long, lost book is now prominently on display amongst the other Christmas books in the Hughes Library's collection.
“This is what we do, and this is what we live for,” Sumner said. "To have it returned to Rugby for Christmas was really a Christmas miracle.”