Scott Joplin House State Historic Site

The Scott Joplin House State Historic Site at 2658 Delmar Blvd in St. Louis, Missouri, preserves the second-floor apartment where composer and pianist Scott Joplin lived between 1900 and 1903—among the most productive years of his career. Administered by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, the site operates as a small but meticulously researched museum dedicated to the life, music, and cultural legacy of the man universally recognized as the King of Ragtime.

Joplin arrived in St. Louis shortly before the 1900 publication of the Maple Leaf Rag, his breakthrough composition and one of the first pieces of sheet music to sell over one million copies. While living at the Delmar Blvd address, Joplin composed The Entertainer (1902), Elite Syncopations (1902), and dozens of other ragtime piano works that fused African American musical traditions with European formal structures to create a distinctly American genre that influenced jazz, blues, and popular music throughout the 20th century. He also began work during this period on Treemonisha, an ambitious opera combining ragtime and operatic forms with a narrative centered on education and community among African American Texans.

The apartment has been restored to approximate its circa-1900 appearance, with period furnishings, a reproduction upright piano, and interpretive displays examining the St. Louis African American community of the late Gilded Age—the social world that shaped Joplin's artistic output. Exhibits trace the history of ragtime as a genre, the economics of early sheet-music publishing, and Joplin's complicated relationship with a music industry that commodified his work while frequently excluding him from mainstream recognition. State park interpreters play recordings of Joplin's compositions throughout the guided tour, creating an immersive musical context for the historic rooms.