In 1870, Hughes travelled to America to meet his friend, the poet James Russell Lowell, and learned of the Boston-based Board of Aid to Land Ownership, which specialized in helping unemployed urban craftsmen relocate to rural areas. Hughes indicated that such an operation might also be beneficial to young, unemployed English gentry. In 1878, Board of Aid president Franklin Webster Smith and an agent with the new Cincinnati Southern Railway, Cyrus Clarke, were travelling on the railroad's new tracks along the Cumberland Plateau when they identified the future site of Rugby, and were impressed with its virgin forests, clear air, and scenic gorges. Clarke secured options on hundreds of thousands of acres of Plateau land. Knoxville attorney Oliver Perry Temple, who became the colony's legal and agricultural advisor, began the complicated process of securing land titles.