Rugby’s first hotel, the Tabard Inn, stood near the Clear Fork River, designed by Boston architect George Fuller and completed in 1880 in time for the colony’s October 5 opening day. Named for the Southwark hostelry from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the three-story inn was described as resembling an English club, with a dining room, billiard tables, tennis and croquet on the lawn, a mansard roof, dormer windows, and spacious ornamented verandahs from which guests could view the mountains and the river bend below. Advertised in large cities in America and England, it drew guests from many American cities and states as well as several foreign countries, offering mountain air, spring and well water, fishing, concerts, boating, bathing, and refined society. In the summer of 1881, a typhoid outbreak traced to a contaminated cistern near the Tabard caused a major crisis for the hotel and the colony, killing seven young Englishmen, sickening many others, and closing the hotel until it reopened on December 1, 1881, after renovation and the provision of a proper water supply. The Tabard was probably profitable only during Abner Ross’s tenure, when his dining room and hospitality became well known. On October 16, 1884, just as the colony seemed to be flourishing, the Tabard caught fire and burned to the ground in what was called a great conflagration, though colonists led by Robert Walton saved many furnishings and the original guest registers. A second Tabard hotel in the Queen Anne style was completed in 1887, but it was never a financial success, and it too burned to the ground in 1899.