Scott Joplin State Historic Site

This space is amazing. Although Mr Joplin only lived here a short time. It was indeed his home. Where he lived and created some most memorable music. The museum is filled with items from that time period. It states the house was built in early 1900. But I think it was late 1800’s. (Architect is unknown) The house still has it’s original wood floors. The restoration efforts are fantastic. There are pieces of the original plaster on display. That was cool to see.
We watched a short film on his life & career. We spent a great deal of time exploring this historic structure. It was like stepping back in time. From the furniture to the old ice box & stove. There are working gas lamps through out house.
An authentic piano player played Joplin’s masterpieces. Just adding to the allure.
Spending time in museum was like an out of body experience. I could just imagine Mr Joplin, upstairs playing the piano by the softly lit gas lamp.
His music is filled with emotion as it tells a story. A story that only Mr Joplin knew.
Kudos to the State of Missouri & Saint Louis for preserving this rich history.
If in STL take time to visit this gem and have the Scott Joplin experience.
Btw… I’ve read where people did not feel safe in the area. We had no problems as we walked to and from downtown. Folks were friendly.

Just about everything you would want to know about Scott Joplin is here. After all, it is the only place in the world that has a museum devoted to the late Ragtimer. The tour guide showed me around after I watched the brief video about Joplin’s life in that one room. The people behind the museum did a great job restoring the rooms with items that were common during the 1900-​05 period, but it is also unfortunate that all of Joplin’s possessions were destroyed more than a century ago. So really they play with our imagination.
One thing about me, is not only am I a history enthusiast, but I have always been about pop-​culture and rock and roll history, too. So I asked the tour guide a lot of questions, and he answered them all greatly. He even told me that Scott hardly even lived in the house for barely a year! If this is true, then I truly wish historians wouldn’t sugarcoat so much information about Joplin’s life, especially the house.
The last part of the tour was going in the piano room, and the guide played ‘The Entertainer’ using the foot-​pedal piano (which was very popular a century ago), where you had to insert piano rolls in. He even let me do a couple songs myself!
I can’t say it was bad nor great. But I did feel like I learned a lot with a little hands-​on.

The tour guide was very up front about the fact that there is almost no documentation from this time in Joplin’s life available, and so the house is restored as kind of a best guess, though he also repeated this fact enough to kind of beat it into the ground.
Our tour and the video were educational, but the real highlight was the player piano. (I’d already restrained myself from touching the Singer sewing machine upstairs, or the gas fixtures, or the kitchen equipment, so it was nice to be able to be a little hands-​on with something.) After the official demonstration we were allowed to linger for a little and look at it; DBF is a musician, and grew up with an old player piano, so he knows a lot about their workings. After that we chatted with the tour guide and looked at the other things in the entry room as we wandered toward the door, and overheard the woman at the desk telling our tour guide «They’ve had their tour, get them out of here!» So the hospitality of the museum can be a bit lacking.
The stuffed Joplins are somewhere between «hilariously Muppety» and «weirdly disturbing.»

My wife and I found this museum to be interesting and worth the stop.
The tour has three parts: a video on the life of Scott Joplin, live performance of some ragtime on two player pianos, and a tour of the home. The video provides a sense of how little is known about Scott Joplin himself as well as what can be pieced together about his frequent movement. The player pianos offer a unique experience in hearing ragtime music and the tour guide had a lot of information to share. The tour of the home offers a little information on the history of the residence and what they could piece together about Joplin’s time there.
I am inclined to agree with Monica and Ethan that there is not a large amount of information offered on Joplin himself. However, the other information offered in the tour (particularly the player piano part) make up for this shortcoming.

I kept seeing signs for the Scott Joplin House along the highway and just had to stop here one day.
I found this place to be very enjoyable and interesting. I loved looking around the place and hearing about the history of it. It’s well worth the time to stop and look around.

This place is in a kind of sketchy-​looking, run down area of town. I didn’t feel unsafe, but maybe that’s because it was 10 am. We got there when the place opened and took some photos outside; my partner is a big ragtime fan. No one else was there at the time. By the time we went in about ten minutes later, there was another couple there. The first part of the tour was a video about 15 minutes in length, about the house, Joplin and his work. I didn’t realize until visiting the house that so little was is known about the man. The only reason tehy know he lived at this location is because of a one-​line entry in a Saint Louis directory from 1904. We looked around at the artifacts in the room, and then one of the employees took us upstairs to show us the apartment he lived in. She didn’t have a lot to say; mostly it was just to take us upstairs so we could look. She was willing to answer questions, of course. We visited the bedroom and parlor, kitchen and washroom. The restoration was nice, and it’s cool that they did what they could to recreate the wall paper and paint colors from what they found amongst the layers on the walls. None of the items were Joplins, but we were told they were appropriate to the period.
At the end, they take you to the player piano room and play a few of the rolls. She asked if we had any preferences for her to play, and all in all we heard three of them. It was kind of neat to see how the player piano worked and watch her play it.
Only the top floor of the place — half of it at that — is where Joplin would have spent his two years in Saint Louis. The shop, entryway, player piano room, video room, etc is a portion that would have been a separate building or downstairs apartment.
For $ 4, it’s not at all something that broke the bank, and my partner was really excited and met a staffer who invited him to the local Ragtime Rendezvous. A lot of what they have — at least in the entry — is about the restoration, not about Joplin or even ragtime music. It seems like the subject of his life is a ripe subject for someone who loves to do deep research. I think this place has some potential; I just wish they’d spend more time on the subject at hand, whether that’s just Joplin, ragtime, or jazz in general. It was kind of a disappointment to go sit and watch a video, then be shown upstairs to walk through a few rooms with no further information. I hope that they spend the time and energy to make this as interesting as it could be.

If you’re a lover of jazz or the roots of jazz, it’s well worth an hour of your time to visit the Scott Joplin house, conveniently located off Delmar near downtown.
Scott Joplin, the father of ragtime, died in New York, but made his home in St. Louis for 2 years and this state historic site preserves that home in a lot of remarkable ways. The floors and some of the furniture is original… those that aren’t are replicas based on the period.
There’s a guided tour that is just a bit more than the cost of admission, and is 15 minutes and worth your time. There’s also a 15 minute video worth watching… but the whole value is in watching a turn of the century piano play one of Joplin’s rags via a punched paper score that a must-​have-​been-​revolutionary device when it premiered. Sitting in that house hearing Maple Leaf Rag… wow.
Reading all the exhibits you aren’t going to be there more than an hour, so well worth stopping in.

I’ve gotta’ concur with Monica B. on this one. The museum is great in theory and seems from afar to be worth the sacrifice. But it’s not.
Actually, it’s absolutely baffling just how little you can end up learning about Joplin and Ragtime after spending a few hours here. The museum is more like a public masturbation session by the people who renovated the house than a place to learn about the history of amazing music and an amazing person.
Too bad, too. I really hate giving a bad review to a museum. In a way, I should just be glad it’s there and that someone took the opportunity to renovate a historic location. But this opportunity taken is more of an opportunity lost for anyone who goes there.

I love what this museum has done with what was once Scott Joplin’s home. The building, formerly abandoned and a victim of a bad fire on the upper floor, has been restored and houses a small exhibit on Scott Joplin’s life. While there are few artifacts from the time on display (and none are SJ’s except for possibly one piano) there is a feeling of authentic ragtime-​era St. Louis to be experienced here. It is a great introduction to ragtime and Scott Joplin for the non-​musicians in your group (my family was humming The Entertainer the rest of the day. This serves as a warning too!). Since I was a pianist in my youth, I knew all about the genius of Scott Joplin and so was dying to go there. The guide let me «play» the old player piano– the cylinder was «The Maple Leaf Rag» but they had all 50 of Joplin’s rags. I could have played the «real» upright from the turn-​of-​the-​century too, but I declined since I haven’t practiced in ten years. My dad kept talking about The Sting with the guide– he was disappointed that there was no placard or display about the movie.
The museum guide and other employees there are wonderfully nice. I called ahead to make sure they were handicap-​accessible (they are) and they helped us bring my 97-​year-​old grandmother around the place.
They have restored a beautiful café next door for party functions. The oak bar is pre-1900’s and it is a beautiful space but it doesn’t quite look finished for some reason. I was hoping that we could sidle up for a sarsaparilla after touring the museum, but the space is only open for certain events. One employee said that they have jazz there some nights– I would definitely come back for that!

Everytime we go to St Louis, I plead with the boyfriend to visit the Scott Joplin House.
I am employed in the museum field, and always enjoy visiting a new historic site or museum. Whenever I review them, I try to put my «professional» standards aside and to evaluate a visit based on the resources available and how successfully a museum accomplishes the goals it sets out for itself.
We took a one hour guided tour through the home. Our host, while knowledgable, often spoke on tangents and did not actually convey the substantial history that the Scott Joplin home has to offer.
We spent almost 40 minutes in the first room of the home, which featured a timeline of compositions of Scott Joplin. While there was some terrific information in this section, it would have been great to actually hear about RAGTIME music! Hearing song samples and why this particular music style was important is critical to understanding the genuis that is Scott Joplin, but instead our guide focused on non-​essential information that was off-​topic.
By the time we made it upstairs into the residence, I was completely losing patience. Our guide was talking about the various furnishings in the rooms, most of which dated between the mid 1920s and even as late as the mid-​late 1930s. Scott Joplin died in 1917. So our guide labored for the remaining 20 minutes about how people ironed their clothes or cooked meals for a time period almost a decade and a half after the death of Scott Joplin.
Perhaps I am a bit too harsh, but as a professional historian I am saddened by the wasted opportunity to communicate an interesting and dynamic historical figure.
For a more concise, interactive, interesting and FREE interpretation of St Louis history, visit the Missouri Historical Society in Forrest Park instead.

This is a great place to check out as it once again shows just how awesome St. Louis really is! Scott Joplin was an important musician/​composer, and his home is now a museum. You can take a tour inside where there are period furniture.
The best thing about this site is the Ragtime Rally. My friend Paul got to play awhile back, and that’s when I first found out about it! Check the schedule at their site, and then come and enjoy the wonderful ragtime music. The quality is supreme and you can’t help but be happy!

For anyone who is a fan of music, history, or enjoys the music from the Paul Newman and Robert Redford classic film «The Sting» or if you enjoy Ragtime music or all of the above, then I would say that it is imperative for you to visit the Scott Joplin House.
Located on Delmar the Scott Joplin house brings you into the world of this famous composer. You can see what his life and home might have looked like in his time. Scott Joplin’s house is filled with period furniture to make the look and the feel of the home authentic for those who take the tours.