The single-room library, opened in 1882, is the most extraordinary object in Rugby. The colonists wanted their settlement to have the cultural infrastructure of a proper English town, and a London publisher's donation seeded a collection of roughly 7,000 books — novels, encyclopaedias, manuals on practical farming, sermons. After the colony collapsed nobody had reason to weed the shelves, and the result is a fossil snapshot of the educated Victorian mind preserved on the Cumberland Plateau.
Visits are by guided tour from the Historic Rugby visitor centre. The library is closed in winter to protect the books from temperature swings, so the spring-to-autumn season is the time to come. Climate control was added in the 2010s but visitor numbers are kept small.