Mariposa (fictional town)

Mariposa is a fictional Canadian town created by Stephen Leacock as the setting for a series of short stories. Commissioned by The Montreal Star newspaper, they were later collected and published in one volume as Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. Since then, many attempts have been made to expand the canon, present it in a different form or make reference to it.

Although the author publicly denied it, the town is closely modelled on the town of Orillia, Ontario, and its inhabitants. He named it after one or more nearby communities, which had borne versions of that name in real life, and have since disincorporated: Mariposa, Ontario, and Mariposa Beach. Leacock was a professor of political economy at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, but he had a summer home at Old Brewery Bay. The names of the characters in the stories were altered to avoid potential libel lawsuits when the stories were published in book form in 1912.

Mariposa has been a subject of academic research in a number of fields, such as small town heritage preservation, and in literary studies of Leacock writings.

The remainder of this article will provide information on Mariposa in the form of a regular geographic entry as if it really existed, with references to the facts associated with the non-fictional models.