The real place
The history beneath the lanterns
Murphysburg is not a stage set. It is one of the places from which modern Joplin grew.
Patrick Murphy purchased land near what is now downtown Joplin in 1871. Murphysburg and neighboring Joplin City joined in 1873, helping form the city known today. The district’s streets and homes preserve layers of the mining era, civic ambition, architecture, family life, and changing ideas about what a city should keep.
Today, preservation groups, residents, museums, and visitors continue to treat the neighborhood as living history. Its variety of historic houses makes it a natural place to imagine the past as something close enough to step through.
Inside the novel
How the parade changes it
In The Midnight Parade, Murphysburg holds the citywide Halloween festival and the lantern-shaped float designed by Tess Mercer. The neighborhood gives the celebration its beauty, but it also gives the magic an opening.
Old houses seem more awake than they should. Streets stretch into unfamiliar versions of themselves. Historical figures enter a present-day celebration. What begins as civic spectacle becomes a test of whether remembering a place means preserving it unchanged or making room for the people living there now.
Fact and fiction
Documented
Murphysburg’s role in Joplin’s early formation, its historic homes, and its preservation story are real.
Imagined
The festival route, returning streets, supernatural thresholds, ghosts, and encounters with the novel’s characters are invented.
Why this place matters
Murphysburg lets the novel place history beside ordinary family life. Tess is trying to hold onto Joplin while her family prepares to leave. The neighborhood is also changing, but it survives because people continue to care for it.
That makes Murphysburg the emotional center of the book’s central question: what does it mean to love a place without trapping it in the past?