Guthrie: The Capital That Time Forgot to Demolish

What you are looking at in Guthrie is a complete Victorian city, not a preserved block or a restored district, but more than two thousand Victorian-era commercial buildings on over fourteen hundred acres, all constructed between eighteen eighty-nine and nineteen ten, and almost none of them torn down. It is the largest contiguous historic district on the National Register of Historic Places.

The reason they survived is the reason most American cities do not preserve things: Guthrie was abandoned as a capital and never grew enough afterward to require demolition.

On April twenty-second, eighteen eighty-nine, the day of the first Oklahoma Land Run, an estimated ten thousand people arrived in Guthrie in a single afternoon. They came by train from Arkansas City, Kansas, and on horseback from the territorial line. By nightfall, a tent city covered the hills along Cottonwood Creek. Within weeks, wooden buildings were going up. Within years, those wood-frames were replaced by the brick Italianate, Romanesque Revival, and Beaux-Arts commercial buildings you see today, many designed by Belgian-born architect Joseph Foucart. Minarets, oriel windows, stone finials, and arched cornices gave the town a European ambition its prairie setting did not demand.

Guthrie was named the first Territorial Capital in eighteen ninety under the Organic Act, and President Benjamin Harrison appointed the first territorial governor. It remained the capital when Oklahoma achieved statehood in nineteen oh seven. Then, on June eleventh, nineteen ten, the capital was abruptly moved to Oklahoma City. Guthrie went quiet. With no economic boom to fuel redevelopment, the Victorian streetscape simply stayed.

In two thousand one, the historic district was designated a National Historic Landmark. Today the buildings house galleries, bed-and-breakfasts, and storefronts, exactly as they did when Oklahoma was still a territory.