Guthrie's First Steps Onto the Internet, When a Mayor's Reelection Campaign Was Listed in the Business Section.

Long before smartphones, social media and Facebook pages became part of everyday life, cities and other local governments were starting to establish their own digital presence on the internet.

Guthrie Was No Exception.

(2003 guthrieky.com website banner)

Taking a look back at 2003, we get a little glimpse into what the city's online presence looked like 23 years ago.

The website was basic, colorful and easily distinguished as from the early days of the web, categorically what my brother-in-law would now label as “early internet cringe”.

The website was made up of GIF banners, simple text, broken image links and a navigation bar that offered everything from city history to current projects, including an update on the highly anticipated completion of the Springmont Walking Trail which included a “foot bridge” to be completed as soon as the weather permitted.

As I navigated the website, the big thing that jumped out to me was something I found on the “Businesses” section.

It had three entries.

Koppers Industries.

McGhee Engineering.

And the reelection campaign of Guthrie Mayor Scott Marshall.

That last one raised a question.

Why was a mayor's campaign website listed alongside local businesses on what appeared to be the City of Guthrie's website?

Being more than intrigued, I started digging.

[Screenshot of 2003's guthrieky.com "MAIN" page]

Welcome to Guthrie... on the Internet

The 2003 website opened with a simple navigation menu:

Main | News | Events | About Us | Contact Info | Pictures | Businesses | City Officials | Facts | History

The main page featured a section titled "Current Projects and Events," highlighting the Springmont Walking Trail and the water plant.

There was also a weather link, a frequently asked questions section, and something that feels particularly appropriate for the early internet: a guestbook.

For those who don’t know about guestbooks, almost every website at the time had one. Essentially visitors could navigate and as this site demonstrates "View Our Guestbook" or "Sign Our Guestbook."

And finally, at the bottom of the page was a copyright notice:

Copyright © Guthrie, Ky 2002-2003

Now, at first glance, it looked like an official small-town municipal website.

It had city projects.

It had city contact information.

It had a list of city officials.

It had the city's history.

But there was more to the story.

But Maybe The Website Wasn't Quite What It Seemed?

When moving to Guthrie in 2016, this site was still as we see it in the screenshots, at least through a back door or mistaken link perhaps. I remember because I’d seen it before when I was investigating Guthrie as a place to live. I assumed that this was Guthrie’s official municipal website at the time, and I can’t imagine most individuals wouldn’t have as it was the website that populated as the only website in a google search.

Later on, it was updated, and again.

According to Tracy, then the city moved from using the guthtrieky.com website to a .gov website, and now the official city website resides at cityofguthrie.org (Make sure it's the .org website! cityofguthrie.com will take you to the website of a city in Oklahoma!). The original domain name can still make it appearance in some web searches with different combinations of key words. And more than that, guthrieky.com is still actively hosted by someone and present on the web.

But after seeing the first one again, and in preparing this story, I decided to find out who actually built it the original 2003 website.

And fortunately for me, the website itself provided a clue.

Under "City Officials," the site listed Scott Marshall as mayor, followed by the members of the city council. It also listed Faye Shamblin as city clerk/treasurer and a person named Richard Austin as the webmaster.

The Contact Information page also directed website-related email to Richard Austin at an email address that appeared to associated with the Marshall family, while providing the city's phone number, address, meeting schedule and other municipal information.

I had never heard of Richard Austin, and could not find him listed in Guthrie anywhere I searched (It’s not like we have the WhitePages that we would have as in 2003), but all other clues led me to Scott Marshall.

I reached out to Scott and asked if he remembered anything about the website, particularly the fact that his reelection campaign appeared in the Business section.

His answer was straightforward and somewhat expected.

He didn't remember.

Scott told me he had no recollection of why his reelection information would have been placed on the city website. He also said he wasn't really involved with the websites and suggested I talk to Tracy Robinson at Guthrie Main Street.

Surprisingly, that turned out to be a pretty good suggestion.

So Who Built It?

Tracy has been involved with Guthrie Main Street since 2002, then called Silver Triangle Main Street. That gives her a pretty long view of the city's transition into the digital age.

According to Tracy, what I had initially assumed was an official city website may have actually been something much more informal.

The site, she explained, began as a school project by an IT student.

That student was Richard Austin Poor.

Tracy recalled that Poor was around 19 years old at the time and was studying information technology in college. He apparently approached the city with the idea that he could build something for free and use it as an opportunity to learn how websites worked.

"In 2003 none of us knew anything about trying to build a website," Tracy recalled.

And so the city, essentially, let him try.

"It was just like a year while they were in school," Tracy said, describing the early site as an experiment rather than a formally commissioned municipal website.

The website wasn't necessarily the result of the city hiring a professional web designer or launching an official digital communications strategy.

It turns out, it was created at the hands of a young IT student trying to figure things out.

And the city was apparently willing to let him figure it out with them. The remnants of which remained visible for nearly a decade before the city shifted the website’s appearance.

(Screenshot of 2003's guthrieky.com "CITY OFFICIALS" page)

A Website That Looked Official (At The Time That Is)

That wasn’t the end of it though, the history behind the website goes much deeper, and is quite a bit more complex than one might imagine.

Even if the website wasn't formally commissioned by the city, it certainly looked like a city website.

It listed the mayor and city council.

It gave the city's mailing address and telephone number.

It published information about city projects and meetings.

It included Guthrie's history.

And it used the city's name throughout the site.

From the perspective of someone simply visiting Guthrieky.com, there wasn't much telling them, "Hey, this is actually a teenager's school project."

That distinction may have mattered more behind the scenes than it did to the person sitting at a computer.

And it helps explain one of the strangest things I found.

Three "Businesses"

Clicking on the site's “Businesses” section produces what I see as the most entertaining discovery on the entire website.

(Screenshot of 2003's guthrieky.com "BUSINESSES" page)

The page was titled "Businesses & Websites."

The first entry was Koppers Industries, described as having a large Guthrie plant that manufactured railroad ties and performed custom fabrication.

The second was McGhee Engineering, described as a civil engineering consulting company whose biggest project at the time was the Logan Todd Regional Water Commission plant in Guthrie.

And then came the third entry:

"Re-Elect Scott Marshall for Mayor."

Underneath it was a link labeled "Marshall 4 Mayor."

There it was.

A mayor's reelection campaign sitting directly underneath two actual businesses.

Naturally, as I imagine the reader does now too, I wanted to know why.

The Mayor From That Time Didn't Remember It

Going back to Scott, you may remember that earlier we learned that he didn’t remember.

When I showed him the archived page and asked about the campaign link, he said he honestly didn't remember.

He did, however, point me toward Tracy Robinson, who had been involved with the community long enough to potentially remember how the website came together.

When I contacted Tracy, she started talking about a website that was approved by the city in 2013.

When I showed her the screen shots, she was a little shocked. But beyond the shock, she remembered it.

And regarding the reelection link? Tracy had a theory.

She believes the listing on the “Businesses” section may have been part of the experimental nature of the site.

Her recollection was that Richard may have been creating placeholders and encouraging people to add their businesses to the page.

And, in Robinson's words, she could imagine the 19-year-old IT student essentially thinking, "I'll put this on there too."

In other words, the campaign listing likely wasn’t the result of some formal decision by the city to classify a political campaign as a business.

Instead, it was more likely part of a young web designer experimenting with what could be put on a new website.

This is quite a different and far more compelling understanding of what may have happened than the page initially appears to tell.

I would also caution the reader to be careful going any further than the evidence allows.

Scott doesn't remember why the link was there, and Tracy doesn't claim to know for certain who added it.

What we do know is that the campaign was there. And as Tracy expressed during our interview “it is what it is…”

From School Project to City Website

As stated earlier, though, the “little experiment” didn't simply disappear. In fact, from my own experience in investigating Guthrie as a potential new residence in 2016, I know that some version of this site was still around.

The site was Guthrie's web presence.

But according to Tracy, the first website the city formally paid to have developed, however, came later.

Robinson recalled that the city approved a new website through Clarksville-based Thrive Creative Group in 2013, with the site still under development in 2014.

The cost was divided between the City of Guthrie and Guthrie Main Street.

She even shared an email she received from Thrive in July 2013 and read part of it to me. The email explained that the City of Guthrie had approved the website project and that Thrive could move forward with collecting the deposit.

That represented a major change from the days of what was believed to be a free IT-student experiment.

The city was no longer simply letting someone learn how to build a website.

It was investing in one.

(Screenshot of guthrieky.com as it stands today)

The Internet Grew Up With Guthrie

The evolution didn't stop there.

The old guthrieky.com domain continued to appear in public references to Guthrie's website years after that original 2003 experiment.

That means the little website I found in the Internet Archive wasn't simply an isolated page that disappeared after a school semester.

It appears to have been the beginning of a much longer digital history for the city.

And that history is interesting because it reflects something that was happening everywhere in the early 2000s.

The internet was new.

Small cities were figuring it out.

Local governments were figuring it out.

Businesses were figuring it out.

And sometimes the person who knew the most about building a website was simply the teenager who happened to be taking an IT class.

Tracy described those early years as challenging for just about everybody.

It was new territory.

There were no established social-media strategies. No Facebook pages. No easy website builders that let someone create a polished municipal website over a lunch break.

And there certainly wasn't an app for it.

There was just someone sitting down at a computer trying to figure it out.

From City Hall to the Digital Footprint

Today, we don't generally think of a website as local history.

I think Tracy’s perspective was quite genuine, and likely how we all feel about it. She shared about the website “That first one’s really archaic, it’s kind of neat to go back and look at how archaic things looked back then compared to what we have now.”

Tracy went on to share that when most people talk about Guthrie's history, they talk about the railroad.

The old hotels.

The businesses that occupied downtown buildings.

The Abshire Building.

The grocery stores (Apparently there were 3 at one time).

The people who lived here.

Then she shared a pointed observation. Tracy said Guthrie has so much history that she never expected to find herself talking about the history of the city's "digital footprint."

And that's really what this old website gives us.

Not just a look at what Guthrie's website looked like in 2003, but a glimpse at how a small community was beginning to figure out what it meant to exist online.

There are plenty of things on that old website that look strange by today's standards.

The rough colors.

The GIFs.

The guestbook.

The "refresh page for updated weather."

The "Coming Soon!" FAQ.

And, yes, a mayor's reelection campaign sitting in the “Businesses” section.

But behind all of that is something a little more interesting.

Guthrie was finding its way onto the internet.

And apparently, like just about everything else in Guthrie, it started with somebody local giving it a try.

(Screenshot of cityofguthrie.org as it stands today)

One Last Look Back

The archived website may be more than 23 years old, but it raises a question that goes beyond this particular page.

How many other pieces of Guthrie's early digital history are still sitting out there somewhere?

Old websites.

Forgotten pages.

Online guestbooks.

Early business listings.

Photos that nobody remembers uploading.

And perhaps a few more things that, at the time, seemed completely ordinary.

Now they're history.

And many are unindexed, and nearly impossible to find through a google search.

Leaving all to wonder... What else is still out there?