Mariposa (fictional Town)
Mariposa is a fictional Canadian town created by Stephen Leacock as the setting for a series of short stories. They were originally commissioned by The Montreal Star newspaper and 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 very real 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, which have since become extinct: 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.
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.
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