Claim to Fame: Places
United States
Guthrie Across America
The Guthrie name appears on the American map for all kinds of reasons: pioneer families, railroad builders, military officers, landowners, miners—and in a few cases, somebody whose identity is still waiting to be discovered.
Alabama
Guthrie Creek
Guthrie Creek runs through an area where members of a documented Guthrie family settled early. The name was also used for the nearby Guthrie Creek Mine in the Jasper coal district.
Two sons of Robert and Betsy Guthrie—Leroy “Lee” Guthrie (1774–1847) and John Guthrie (1781–1869)—settled in the Walker County area. Their presence makes this family an obvious lead, but no record has yet been found proving that either man supplied the creek’s name.
Arizona
Guthrie
This mining and railroad point on the Gila River was named for Guthrie Smith, a Scottish stockholder associated with the Arizona Copper Company. Guthrie Smith and J. Duncan Smith sold land to the company as it developed its railroad toward the Clifton mining district.
The post office operated from 1901 until 1922. Nearby Guthrie Peak appears to have taken its name from the settlement.
Guthrie Mountain
A separate Arizona namesake: Guthrie Mountain was named for John D. Guthrie of the U.S. Forest Service, formerly supervisor of the Coronado National Forest.
Arkansas
Guthrie Township
The township is associated with Grandison Graves Guthrie, born in Tennessee in 1824, who settled in Izard County and married Mary A. Benbrook. His younger brother Robert Landon Guthrie also came to Arkansas.
The township survives as an official Izard County subdivision, preserving the name of this nineteenth-century Guthrie family on the Arkansas map.
California
Guthrie Creek & Guthrie Creek Beach
U.S. place-name records state that Guthrie Creek was named for an early settler, but do not identify that person.
The creek reaches the Pacific at Guthrie Creek Beach near Ferndale, giving the same mysterious early Guthrie a particularly scenic footprint on the California coast.
Alexander P. Guthrie and his family were living in Humboldt County by the 1860 census and provide one possible research lead—but there is not yet enough evidence to identify him as the namesake.
Guthrie
A former settlement along the Southern Pacific Railway between Napa and Napa Junction. The place survives in historical geographic references, but its Guthrie namesake has not yet been identified.
Connecticut
Guthrie Place
At the top of Guthrie Place stands the Lighthouse Inn, originally Meadow Court, the summer estate of Pittsburgh steel-industry businessman Charles Strong Guthrie and his family.
The Colonial Revival residence was completed in 1902. After the Guthrie family began selling portions of the estate, the house became an inn in 1927.
Delaware
Guthrie Branch
This small stream flows toward the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal. Geographic records also preserve the historical variant name Guthrie Run.
The name is old enough to have developed more than one recorded form, but the Guthrie behind it has not yet been identified.
Illinois
Guthrie
Illinois place-name research records Guthrie as an Illinois Central Railroad station established about 1876 and reports that it was named for a director of the railroad.
The settlement later became known simply as Guthrie. Its post office opened in 1876, the village was platted in 1892, and the railroad station closed in 1932.
Indiana
Guthrie Township
Guthrie Township was created in the 1860s and named for one of Lawrence County’s prominent pioneer families.
The Guthries had arrived much earlier. Daniel and John Guthrie, with members of the closely associated Flinn family, came into what became Lawrence County during the territorial period and were among the founders of the Leesville community.
County history records an early land entry for Daniel Guthrie in 1816.
Iowa
Guthrie County & Guthrie Center
Captain Edwin Guthrie
Guthrie County was created in 1851 and named in memory of Captain Edwin Guthrie of Fort Madison, Iowa, an officer in Company K of the Fifteenth United States Infantry during the Mexican-American War.
Edwin was born in New York in 1806, a son of physician and chemist Dr. Samuel Guthrie and Sibyl Sexton. He married Adaline Jewett and later moved west to Iowa.
Historical Iowa accounts credit Edwin’s friend Theophilus Bryan with helping secure the county’s name in his memory.
What Happened in Mexico?
Edwin Guthrie was wounded in the knee on 20 June 1847 during fighting at La Hoya. After suffering two unsuccessful amputations, he died on 20 July 1847.
His death therefore preceded the Battle of Churubusco in August 1847. Major Frederick Mills was the Iowa officer killed following that later battle.
United States · Kansas through Missouri
This stretch of the map includes one of the collection’s darkest naming stories, one of its most famous political namesakes, and several places where the Guthrie behind the name has yet to step out of the records.
Kansas
Guthrie Mound / Guthrie Mountain
John R. Guthrie
On the night of 5 February 1860, John R. Guthrie was seized and hanged on a mound near Mapleton during the violent closing years of the Kansas territorial struggle.
A contemporary letter written only a week afterward reported that Guthrie had been accused of horse stealing, arrested without lawful authority and hanged without even a mock trial.
The hill, previously known in at least one contemporary account as Tigret Mound, became associated thereafter with Guthrie’s name.
History Became Legend
Later accounts differ sharply over Guthrie’s politics, character and even whether contemporaries considered the killing a lynching or a form of frontier “justice.”
Local lore eventually added a curse: Guthrie supposedly predicted that the men responsible for his death would themselves meet violent ends.
The curse belongs to folklore. The hanging itself is well documented and remains one of the more unsettling stories behind a Guthrie place name.
Kentucky
Guthrie
The town was laid out as the Louisville & Nashville Railroad reached the area in the late 1860s. Landowner J. C. Kendall named the new community for James Guthrie of Louisville, then president of the railroad.
James Guthrie had already served as United States Secretary of the Treasury under President Franklin Pierce and later represented Kentucky in the United States Senate.
The town was formally incorporated in the nineteenth century and remains directly across the state line from South Guthrie, Tennessee—a place with a very different history that appears later on this page.
Louisiana
Guthrie
Guthrie is a recognized community in Ouachita Parish and appears in Louisiana place directories and geographic records.
Gazetteer references report that residents have used “Guthrian” as a local demonym—a community whose people have a name, even though we still do not know the Guthrie who supplied theirs.
The community appears on maps by the early twentieth century, but the origin of the place name remains unresolved.
Michigan
Guthrie
Guthrie is a small unincorporated community in Sylvan Township, west of Ann Arbor and near Chelsea.
The community itself is well established in geographic records, but a reliable account explaining the Guthrie name has not yet surfaced.
Guthrie Lake
Guthrie Lake is a documented natural lake in Otsego County. Modern geographic records confirm the feature, but not the identity of its namesake.
Minnesota
Guthrie Township
Guthrie Township takes its name from its former railway village, which commemorated railroad contractor Archibald Guthrie.
Guthrie was a major St. Paul-based railroad builder whose firm carried out construction projects across the Upper Midwest. The village arose along the Minnesota & International Railway during the region’s logging era.
The township survives today even though the old railway settlement is much smaller than it was during the height of timber and rail activity.
Missouri
Guthrie & Guthrie Township
First Bigbee—Then Guthrie
The community was established on 26 September 1872 by B. S. Bigbee and was initially named for him.
In 1874 the name was changed to Guthrie in honor of brothers Samuel N. Guthrie and John Guthrie, who were prominent members of the surrounding community.
The larger Guthrie Township later took its name from the same prominent local family.
A Documented Guthrie Family
Samuel N. and John were sons of Samuel Taylor Guthrie, who was born in Kentucky in 1793 to Robert Guthrie and Mary Taylor.
Samuel Taylor Guthrie was in Callaway County by the 1830 census and died there in 1872. He is buried in Guthrie Cemetery.
Unlike many places on this page, the namesake family here is not merely suspected—we can place it within an established Guthrie paternal group.
United States · North Carolina through Oklahoma
Here the Guthrie name belongs to a Virginia tobacco grower who helped change North Carolina agriculture, a railroad contractor remembered in two states, several Ohio mysteries, and one city that went from a lonely railroad station to a territorial capital almost overnight.
North Carolina
Guthrie
The community was named for Jackson Guthrie, a Virginia-born settler and tobacco grower who came from Halifax County, Virginia, to northern Forsyth County about 1858.
Jackson was not simply another farmer moving south across the Virginia line. A contemporary 1878 regional guide specifically credited Jackson Guthrie, Edward Marshall and W. J. Kirby—all experienced Virginia tobacco growers—with helping demonstrate the commercial potential of tobacco in Forsyth County.
Their success encouraged neighboring farmers to expand tobacco cultivation, part of the agricultural transformation that would eventually make the Winston-Salem region internationally famous for the crop.
Guthrie Point
Guthrie Point is a coastal cape on Taylor Bay near the Goose Creek Shoals. Carteret County has a long-standing Guthrie population, but the individual or family responsible for this particular place name has not yet been identified.
North Dakota
Guthrie
This former Great Northern Railway station was founded in 1910 along the Surrey cutoff, about five miles north of Drake.
It was named for Archibald Guthrie, head of the St. Paul contracting firm responsible for grading work during construction of the line.
A post office opened in January 1911. For a time Guthrie became a small but active settlement, reporting about 100 residents as late as 1930. The post office closed in 1946, and the community gradually faded from the landscape.
Ohio
Guthrie
Guthrie is a small place name in Lawrence County near the Ohio River and the historic Hanging Rock iron region.
A reliable naming history has not yet surfaced. Because numerous Guthrie families moved through southern Ohio during the nineteenth century, the name should not be attached to a particular lineage without additional evidence.
Guthrie Road
Local histories place a William Guthrie among the early settlers in this part of Richland County around 1815.
The rural road may preserve the surname of that settler family, but the naming connection has not yet been demonstrated by a road-order, plat or property record.
Guthrie Road
A second Ohio Guthrie Road lies in the Dayton area near the Great Miami River. No evidence presently connects its name with the Richland County road—or with any specific Guthrie family.
Oklahoma
Guthrie
From Deer Creek to Guthrie
Before there was a city, there was a railroad stop. The Southern Kansas Railway established Deer Creek station in March 1887 on its line through Indian Territory.
The name was changed to Guthrie in honor of prominent Topeka jurist John Guthrie.
John Guthrie was born in Switzerland County, Indiana, on 2 July 1829. He became a lawyer, Civil War officer, Kansas legislator and later judge of Kansas’s Third Judicial District.
A City Appears in a Day
On 22 April 1889, the opening of the Unassigned Lands triggered the first great Oklahoma land run. Roughly fifty thousand participants rushed into the opened lands seeking farms and town lots.
Guthrie was one of the places transformed almost instantly. The original site became four adjoining towns: Guthrie, East Guthrie, West Guthrie and Capital Hill. They consolidated in 1890.
Within a remarkably short period the prairie settlement acquired newspapers, churches, schools, brick commercial buildings and the institutions of territorial government.
United States · Pennsylvania through Tennessee
Pennsylvania gives us two very different Guthrie stories—one rooted in a long-established Chester County family and another on the western frontier. Tennessee then shows how a place name can acquire an entirely new history after crossing a state line.
Pennsylvania
Guthriesville
A Village Full of Guthries
The Guthrie presence in this part of Chester County predates the formal village by decades. Members of the family were living and working in East Brandywine and neighboring townships during the eighteenth century.
Local place-name history credits Joseph Guthrie with establishing a substantial house at the crossroads in 1806, around which the small village developed.
The name appears as Guthriesville in early nineteenth-century postal records.
Storekeepers, Blacksmiths & a Postmaster
This was not a place named for one passing stranger. Several generations of the local Guthrie family were woven into village life.
William Guthrie operated a blacksmith shop where Guthriesville developed, while his brother John worked as a carriage builder. William’s son James Batten Guthrie became a storekeeper and served as the village’s first postmaster.
The post office was established on 7 January 1831.
Guthrie’s Run
Guthrie’s Run enters the Allegheny River a few miles north of Kittanning. Family and local histories have associated the stream with Capt. William Guthrie, one of the men who served on Pennsylvania’s western frontier during and after the Revolutionary War.
William enlisted in 1776, fought at Trenton and Princeton, and later served as lieutenant and then captain of frontier rangers protecting the Westmoreland settlements.
His death is unusually well documented. In 1828, William was killed when a wagon went over the side of a high bridge. His widow, Elizabeth Guthrie Brownlee Guthrie, described his service and the family’s hardships in a petition to the Pennsylvania legislature the following year.
Tennessee
South Guthrie
One Community, Two States
South Guthrie lies immediately across the Tennessee state line from Guthrie, Kentucky, the railroad town named for statesman and Louisville & Nashville Railroad president James Guthrie.
Yet South Guthrie developed a history distinctly its own. During the Jim Crow era, the Tennessee side became the predominantly African-American community associated with the predominantly white Kentucky town.
The state boundary became more than a line on the map—it also reflected the racial and social divisions of the period.
A Community Built from Within
African-American residents established institutions that became anchors of community life. Guildfield Missionary Baptist Church traces its congregation to meetings held in 1868 and formal organization in 1869.
The present church building dates to 1922 and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
South Guthrie’s former Rosenwald school, also built in 1922, later became the community center. It is the only surviving Rosenwald school building of the twenty-two once found in Montgomery County.
United States · Texas through Wyoming
The last four states take us from the great ranching country of northwest Texas to an early Kanawha Valley settlement, a Wisconsin crossroads named for its postmaster, and finally a tiny Wyoming post office operated by a Guthrie family on the western frontier.
Texas
Guthrie
W. H. Guthrie of Kentucky
Guthrie’s recorded history begins with the Louisville Land and Cattle Company, a Kentucky-based enterprise that acquired substantial acreage in this part of Texas in 1883.
The settlement was named for W. H. Guthrie of Kentucky, one of the company’s leading stockholders.
His full identity and paternal Guthrie family remain open research questions.
The Fight for the County Seat
A. C. Thackitt surveyed the Guthrie townsite in 1891, the same year King County was organized.
The Louisville Land and Cattle Company promoted a competing company townsite called Ashville, but Thackitt led the campaign for Guthrie.
Voters selected Guthrie as the county seat. Today it is also closely associated with the enormous Four Sixes Ranch.
West Virginia
Guthrie
Local history traces the community to James Guthrie, who settled in the Union District of Kanawha County about 1798, when the area was still part of Virginia.
According to Sissonville: A Time to Remember, James acquired a large tract of land that came to be known as the town of Guthrie.
Wisconsin
Guthrie
Wisconsin place-name research identifies the community’s namesake as Charles R. Guthrie, its first postmaster.
Charles opened the Guthrie post office in January 1896, and the small settlement acquired his surname.
William and Sarah (Neill) Guthrie were also prominent Guthrie residents of Vernon Township, but residence in the same area does not by itself establish that they supplied the community’s name. The post-office evidence identifies Charles R. Guthrie directly.
Wyoming
Guthrie Post Office
The Guthrie post office was established in February 1895 in rural Converse County. Its first postmaster was Isabel M. Guthrie, wife of Silas Albans Guthrie.
The office was discontinued on 15 October 1902, after which its mail was handled by the Labonte post office.
Twenty-Five States—and Twenty-Five Different Stories
Some American Guthrie places preserve the name of a railroad builder, politician, postmaster or pioneer family. Others still refuse to tell us who their Guthrie was. That variety is exactly what makes the map interesting: the same surname reached different corners of the country through entirely separate families and entirely different histories.
Canada
The Guthrie Name Heads North
Canada’s Guthrie map is surprisingly extensive. Some names commemorate identifiable people, some belong to districts where Guthrie families actually lived, and many northern lakes, bays, points and islands still keep their origins to themselves.
Ontario
Guthrie
Was It Named for Rev. Thomas Guthrie?
The Township of Oro-Medonte’s community history says that the hamlet’s name originated with the celebrated Scottish minister Rev. Thomas Guthrie, D.D..
If that local tradition is correct, this small Ontario community has a direct connection with one of the people featured on our Claim to Fame: People page.
An Early Source Tells a Different Story
A 1906 Ontario Historical Society study of Simcoe County post-office names grouped Guthrie among places named for the first settlers of the immediate locality.
Until the early local Guthrie family is identified—or a contemporary record explicitly names Rev. Thomas as the inspiration—the origin remains unsettled.
Guthrie Township
Guthrie Township was organized in 1890 and named for Donald Guthrie, Q.C., of Guelph.
Donald represented Wellington South in the Canadian House of Commons from 1876 to 1882 and later entered the Ontario legislature.
Guthrie’s Hill
Canada’s official geographical-name database preserves Guthrie’s Hill in Simcoe County. Whether it is connected with the Guthrie community in Oro-Medonte or with a separate landowner remains to be determined.
Quebec
Guthrie
The Canadian Geographical Names Database recognizes Guthrie as an official named locality within Saint-Armand in Quebec’s Eastern Townships.
Scottish immigrants David Guthrie and Ann Watson were living in St-Armand by the 1842 census and remained there for decades. Later records describe members of their extended family as living at “Guthrie, St. Armand.”
Pont Guthrie
The little red Pont Guthrie carries Chemin Édoin over Groat Creek at Pigeon Hill.
Specialist bridge research dates the surviving structure to 1888, and local history states that it took the name of an old Guthrie family of Pigeon Hill.
Manitoba
Guthrie Across Manitoba
Manitoba contains a striking cluster of officially recognized Guthrie geographic names. They are scattered across a very large province and should not be assumed to derive from one person or family.
Northern Manitoba
Manitoba
Manitoba
Manitoba
Manitoba
New Brunswick
Guthrie Point
Guthrie Point is an official coastal geographic name in Charlotte County, New Brunswick.
The county also contained nineteenth-century Guthrie families, but no evidence yet securely connects a particular family to the point’s name.
More Official Guthrie Names in Canada
The national geographical database also records Guthrie Bay in Saskatchewan and Guthrie Creek in the Northwest Territories. These are officially recognized features whose naming stories remain to be discovered.
Smaller geographic features can be added as research uncovers something meaningful about the people, events or surveys behind their names.
Australia
A Guthrie Name Written Across the Land
In South Australia, Guthrie is not the name of a town but of an official land division. Its namesake can be identified with unusual confidence: a Scottish-born sailor and labor advocate who was already serving in the colonial parliament when the Hundred of Guthrie was proclaimed in 1893.
Hundred of Guthrie
What Is a “Hundred”?
In South Australia, a hundred is a cadastral—or land-survey—division within a county. It was used to describe, survey and administer parcels of land rather than to count one hundred residents or houses. The Hundred of Guthrie lies within the County of Way and includes land in the Mudamuckla–Puntabie area east of Ceduna.
Proclaimed in 1893
The Hundred of Guthrie was officially proclaimed on 18 May 1893.
South Australian place-name records identify its namesake as Robert Storrie Guthrie, then a member of the South Australian Legislative Council.
The name became more than a mark on a cadastral map. A Guthrie Post Office later served the district before closing in 1910, and a Hundred of Guthrie School briefly opened in 1933.
The township of Mudamuckla, about 40 kilometres east of Ceduna, was later laid out within the Hundred of Guthrie.
Robert Storrie Guthrie
Robert Storrie Guthrie was born at Partick, near Glasgow, Scotland, a son of Andrew Guthrie, a joiner, and Elizabeth Storrie.
He went to sea as a youth and eventually settled into the South Australian coastal trade. His firsthand experience of maritime working conditions led to a long career in the trade-union movement.
Guthrie became secretary of the South Australian branch of the Federated Seamen’s Union and was elected to the South Australian Legislative Council in 1891. The Hundred bearing his name was proclaimed two years later.
In 1903 he moved into federal politics, representing South Australia in the Australian Senate until his death in 1921.
Not a Town—but Definitely a Guthrie Place
The Hundred of Guthrie is a useful reminder that names can survive on maps in forms unfamiliar to us today. Here a nineteenth-century Scottish emigrant left his surname not on a street or village, but across an entire surveyed division of South Australian land.
Jamaica
A Guthrie Name in the Landscape of the First Maroon War
Guthrie’s Defile is very different from a town named for its founder or a road named for a nearby landowner. It belongs to the rugged Cockpit Country where Jamaica’s Leeward Maroons successfully resisted repeated attempts by British colonial forces to subdue them—and where Colonel John Guthrie became one of the colonial negotiators of the peace agreement concluded with Maroon leader Cudjoe in 1739.
Guthrie’s Defile
A Passage Almost Designed for Defense
Pettee River Bottom was a narrow, enclosed Cockpit Country valley supplied by one of the few reliable interior water sources. Access was through confined corridors or defiles where an approaching force could be forced into single file. The surrounding limestone ridges gave Maroon defenders an enormous advantage over larger colonial forces unfamiliar with the terrain.
Colonel John Guthrie
John Guthrie was Colonel of the militia in Westmoreland Parish, Jamaica, and also served as Custos Rotulorum of Westmoreland Parish.
Later historical accounts describe him as having come to Jamaica from the failed Scottish settlement at Darien in Panama. By the 1730s he was firmly established in western Jamaica and involved in colonial military operations against the Maroons.
In February 1739, King George II’s authority was formally conveyed to John Guthrie and Francis Sadler to negotiate with Cudjoe and his captains.
The surviving agreement names Guthrie and Sadler directly as the authorized negotiators.
Cudjoe and the Leeward Maroons
The peace did not result from a straightforward colonial military victory. Cudjoe—also rendered Kojo—and the Leeward Maroons had maintained an effective resistance in terrain that colonial expeditions had repeatedly failed to master.
Cudjoe’s network of Cockpit Country strongholds allowed relatively small Maroon forces to move, observe and fight on terms that favored them.
The colonial government ultimately pursued negotiation, and Cudjoe negotiated from the position of a leader whose community had preserved its freedom through years of armed resistance.
Peace, Freedom—and Complicated Terms
The agreement concluded on 1 March 1739 recognized Cudjoe and the people under his command as being thereafter in a state of freedom and liberty and granted them 1,500 acres of land.
The treaty also imposed significant obligations. The Maroons were required to assist the colonial government against future rebellion or invasion and to return certain future runaways. Those provisions became part of a difficult and lasting legacy within Jamaican Maroon history.
The agreement was later ratified by the Jamaican legislature. The confirming act again named Colonel John Guthrie, Lieutenant Francis Sadler and Cudjoe as the parties who had executed the articles.
Landscape: The Parish History of St. James — Pettee River Bottom and its defiles ↗.
Historical place name: Robert Charles Dallas, The History of the Maroons, 1803 ↗.
John Guthrie: Monumental inscription at Cross Path, Westmoreland Parish, Jamaica, and Jamaica Assembly records concerning his widow Mary.
More Than a Namesake
Guthrie’s Defile preserves a surname within one of the most important landscapes of Jamaican resistance history. The name recalls Colonel John Guthrie, but the place itself tells a much larger story—the military skill of the Maroons, the defensive power of the Cockpit Country, and the negotiations through which Cudjoe’s community secured formal recognition of its freedom.
Malaysia
How a Family Name Became a Highway
Malaysia gives us one of the longest journeys from person to place anywhere in this collection. The Guthrie Corridor Expressway was not directly named for a man called Guthrie. Instead, its name came from a corridor of plantation estates owned by the Guthrie business group—a corporate identity whose history leads all the way back to Scottish merchant Alexander Guthrie in 1821.
Guthrie Corridor Expressway · E35
Alexander Guthrie to a Malaysian Expressway
The highway therefore preserves Alexander Guthrie’s surname indirectly through nearly two centuries of commercial history.
The Guthrie Corridor
By the late twentieth century, Kumpulan Guthrie Berhad owned a substantial corridor of plantation estates stretching through Selangor from the Shah Alam area north toward Rawang.
In 1997, the company described its approximately 4,600-hectare Guthrie Corridor as a major property-development project.
The eventual expressway followed this developing corridor, connecting Shah Alam with Rawang and providing access to places including Bukit Jelutong, Bukit Subang, Sungai Buloh, Paya Jaras and Lagong.
The Guthrie Corridor Expressway opened in 2005. Official highway documents give the main route length as approximately 22.65 kilometres.
Alexander Guthrie of Angus
Alexander Guthrie (1796–1865) was born at Burnside in the parish of Menmuir, Angus, Scotland.
In 1821 he arrived in the newly established British trading port of Singapore and laid the foundations of what became Guthrie & Company, one of the region’s earliest British trading houses.
The firm initially dealt in trade between Britain and Southeast Asia. Over succeeding generations it expanded into agency work, finance and the management of plantation interests across Malaya.
Alexander left Singapore in 1847, but the company carrying his surname remained a major commercial presence in Southeast Asia long after his death.
Corporate history: SD Guthrie · Our History ↗.
Alexander Guthrie in Singapore: National Heritage Board of Singapore, Singapore River Walk heritage guide ↗.
Guthrie Corridor: Kumpulan Guthrie Berhad corporate history and annual records, including the 1997 announcement of its 4,600-hectare property corridor.
A Surname That Outlived the Man
Alexander Guthrie never saw an oil-palm plantation, a Malaysian expressway or the modern Klang Valley. Yet the trading house he established in Singapore carried his surname through generations of commercial change until “Guthrie” became a familiar corporate and geographic name in Malaysia. The expressway is one of the most visible surviving results of that long journey.
New Zealand
Guthrie in the Volcanic Plateau
South of Rotorua, amid the farming districts of New Zealand’s volcanic plateau, the Guthrie name marks a locality developed during the years between the two world wars. This time there is no mystery about the man behind the name.
Guthrie
A Farming District Takes the Guthrie Name
Guthrie and neighboring Horohoro are farming districts southwest of Rotorua that were developed during the period between the First and Second World Wars.
New Zealand’s national encyclopedia, Te Ara, states directly that Guthrie was named for D. H. Guthrie, a Minister of Lands during the 1920s.
The setting makes the choice particularly appropriate. David Henry Guthrie’s most important ministerial work concerned land administration and the settlement of returned servicemen on farms after the First World War.
The Guthrie locality remains a rural place rather than a large town, but the minister’s surname has survived on New Zealand maps for about a century.
Hon. David Henry Guthrie
David Henry Guthrie was born in 1856 at Abbeyleix, Queen’s County, Ireland and emigrated to New Zealand in 1876.
He first worked as a teacher and later became a successful farmer in the Rangitikei district. His involvement in county government, education and the Farmers’ Union eventually led him into national politics.
Guthrie represented Oroua in Parliament from 1908 until 1925. He entered the ministry in 1918 as Minister of Lands and later also served as Minister of Railways.
After retiring from the House of Representatives because of ill health, he was appointed to the Legislative Council. He died on 31 March 1927.
A Small Place With a Very Clear Namesake
Many of the places in this collection leave us searching for the Guthrie behind the name. New Zealand gives us the opposite problem: the namesake is securely identified, while the remaining mystery lies farther back in David Henry Guthrie’s own family tree.
Guthrie, Mpumalanga
A Guthrie place-name with a story still waiting to be discovered
Guthrie
Tucked into the landscape of Mpumalanga is a locality simply called Guthrie. It appears in South African geographical records and on modern maps, placing the Guthrie name in the northeastern part of the country.
The locality is also associated with a Guthrie plantation and forestry area, adding another clue to its history—but not yet an answer to the most interesting question: how did Guthrie get its name?
So far, no reliable historical source has been found identifying a particular Guthrie person or family as the namesake. Nor have we found evidence showing that the locality inherited the name from a documented Guthrie landowner. Until that paper trail appears, the origin of Guthrie, Mpumalanga remains an open question.
A Tidbit Still Looking for Its Backstory
This is exactly the kind of place that makes the collection fun. The Guthrie name is unquestionably on the map, but the genealogy behind it has not yet surfaced. Older plantation records, forestry records, survey material, historical maps, or land records may eventually reveal whether a Guthrie stood behind the name—or whether its origin lies somewhere else entirely.
Scotland
Back to Guthrie
After following the Guthrie name through seven other countries, the map brings us back to Angus. Here Guthrie is not simply a town or stream that happens to share the surname. It is a historic territorial name, a parish, a castle, a medieval church site—and from the fifteenth century onward, the documented center of the family known as the Guthries of Guthrie.
This Place Is Different
Many places elsewhere on this page were named for a particular Guthrie. In Angus the relationship is older and more complicated. The place-name Guthrie existed as a territorial identity, while the surviving records securely show the Kincaldrum family acquiring the lands in the fifteenth century and thereafter using Guthrie as a landed designation. What happened before that documented transition remains a subject for evidence rather than assumption.
Guthrie
The Place Before Sir David
Guthrie was already a recognized place-name before Master David Guthrie of Kincaldrum acquired the lands in the fifteenth century.
Later local histories often presented the relationship very simply: the place gave its name to an ancient Guthrie family. That may preserve part of the truth, but the surviving evidence does not yet establish a continuous pedigree of hereditary Guthrie proprietors stretching back from Sir David into the thirteenth or fourteenth century.
The Documentary Turning Point
The secure transition occurs on 25 March 1465/66, when King James III granted the lands and barony of Guthrie to Master David Guthrie of Kincaldrum following their resignation by David, Earl of Crawford.
The wording is especially useful because the charter still calls David “of Kincaldrum” at the precise moment when Guthrie entered his documented possession.
Subsequent records increasingly identify him as David Guthrie of Guthrie or of that Ilk.
Guthrie Castle
Permission to Build a Fortress
Only a few years after acquiring Guthrie, Sir David sought royal authority to establish a fortified residence there.
On 14 September 1468, King James III granted him licence to build a tower or fortalice on the lands of Guthrie.
David could strengthen it with walls and ditches and secure it with an iron door or yett.
From Medieval Tower to Country House
The medieval tower survived while the family residence changed around it.
A mansion was built close to the tower around 1760. In 1818, a linking wing physically joined the mansion to the older tower.
In 1848, architect David Bryce remodeled and extended the residence, creating much of the nineteenth-century composition seen today while retaining the medieval tower at its core.
Guthrie Collegiate Church & Aisle
Sir David Began It
Sir David began providing for a collegiate church at Guthrie, supported by clergy who would celebrate worship and pray for members of the founder’s family.
David died in 1474 before the institution received its final papal confirmation. His son Sir Alexander Guthrie continued the work.
A Piece of the Medieval Church Survives
Papal confirmation followed on 14 June 1479, and the surviving Guthrie Collegiate Aisle remains in the churchyard today.
The aisle originally projected from the south side of the medieval parish church and served as the Guthrie family burial place and collegiate chapel.
Historic Environment Scotland identifies it as an unusually complete surviving example of a late-medieval rural collegiate aisle.
Where Place and Family Converged
Guthrie, Angus, is where this collection stops being merely a tour of places bearing the surname. The surviving charters show an already established Guthrie family at Kincaldrum acquiring the lands of Guthrie, building a fortified home there, founding a church and carrying the territorial designation into later generations.
The unanswered question lies earlier: how the still older Guthrie place-name and the documented Guthrie family of Kincaldrum first came together.
Put Guthrie on the Map
Know a Guthrie Place We Missed?
There are almost certainly more. A Guthrie name may be hiding on an old county atlas, beside a forgotten railway line, at a cemetery gate, along a country road—or attached to a creek that nobody has thought much about for a hundred years. If you find one, we’d like to know both where it is and, if possible, whose name it carries.
Found Another Guthrie on the Map?
Send the town, road, creek, lake, mountain, railway station, township, cemetery, historic property or other place name. A modern map reference or approximate location is enough to get the search started.
Know Who It Was Named For?
Several places on this page still have a Name Origin Unknown label. Local histories, newspaper articles, road petitions, land deeds, railway records and family papers may contain exactly the clue we need.
Found a Name That Has Disappeared?
Former settlements, abandoned railway stops, old post offices and renamed waterways belong here too. Historical maps are often the only surviving evidence that a tiny Guthrie place ever existed.
Can You Identify the Guthrie Line?
Once a namesake is known, the next question is genealogical. Parents, spouses, migration history and direct paternal Y-DNA may allow us to connect that person with one of the established Guthrie Family Groups.
What Makes a Naming Story Convincing?
The strongest evidence usually comes from a contemporary or near- contemporary source: a town plat, post-office application, railway record, county history, newspaper notice, municipal minute book, surveyor’s record, government geographic-name file or deed showing a Guthrie landowner at the location. Later family tradition can be a valuable clue, but we try to distinguish a good story from a documented naming history.
Look for the Blue “Name Origin Unknown” Labels
Those are not unfinished entries we forgot to research. They are active questions. Somewhere there may be a county road order naming William Guthrie’s farm, an old railway directory identifying a company director, or a surveyor’s notebook explaining why a lake received the surname. Solving even one of those small mysteries can restore a forgotten person to the map.
From Places Back to People
A place name is often only the beginning. Follow the people into the Guthrie Research Tree, compare their paternal lines in the Guthrie DNA Project, meet more notable Guthries on Claim to Fame: People, or return to Tidbits for another piece of Guthrie history.
Help Put Another Guthrie on the Map
Know a town, creek, road, farm, hill, railway stop, historic site—or some other corner of the world carrying the Guthrie name? We would love to hear about it. This collection is meant to grow as new places and better evidence come to light.
Found Another Guthrie Place?
Send the place name and location, along with a map, photograph, historical reference or other clue if you have one.
Know Who It Was Named For?
A local history, deed, newspaper article, government record or family document may solve one of the naming mysteries still marked Probable or Unknown.
Have a Correction or New Clue?
Place histories change as better records surface. Corrections, alternate spellings, earlier names and stronger documentary evidence are always welcome.
What Helps Most?
If possible, include the place name, country or region, the source where you found it, and any evidence explaining why it carries the Guthrie name. If a particular Guthrie person or family is involved, genealogical details are especially useful—and a known Guthrie Family Group connection is even better.
Every Guthrie place has a story. Some are already well documented. Others are still waiting for the right record—or the right researcher—to connect the name on the map with the people behind it.