Appalachian families in the Rugby area, including the Massengales, lived largely off the land through the 18th and 19th centuries, farming, hunting, gathering, and using forest resources to build log cabins and outbuildings and to produce most of what they needed. Before 1880, obtaining items they could not raise, hunt, gather, or make required a difficult trip of about fifteen miles by ox or horse-drawn wagon to Jamestown on the Old Jacksboro Road, but the arrival of the Rugby Colony brought nearby access to a commissary and shops for store-bought goods. These families raised cattle, sheep, hogs, and poultry for meat and other uses, producing milk, cheese, butter, hides, eggs, feathers, wool, candles, and lye soap, while spinning and weaving wool into clothing and coverlets. In 1880, the Massengales reported substantial farm output, including butter, honey, and apple trees, suggesting sales to nearby coal miners in Glen Mary and to the earliest Rugby colonists who began arriving in late 1878. Their year-round labor on the Cumberland Plateau demanded constant work in farming, animal care, food preparation, toolmaking, spinning, weaving, soap making, and many other tasks, sustaining an independent way of life especially valued by English-Scots-Irish immigrants and their descendants in Appalachia from the 17th to early 20th centuries.