Before Joplin was incorporated in 1873, two distinct lead and zinc mining communities, Murphysburg and Joplin City, stood on opposite sides of Joplin Creek, with Murphysburg to the northwest and Joplin City to the southeast. In July 1871, early settler John C. Cox laid out Joplin City southeast of the creek and named it for his friend Rev. Harris G. Joplin, a Methodist minister who leased land from Cox and built a cabin on an 80-acre tract near the creek that also bore his name. Two months later, Murphysburg was created from a 40-acre tract northwest of Joplin Creek platted by Patrick Murphy, W.P. Davis, C.W. Elliot, and William Byers. After Patrick Murphy accepted the name Joplin instead of Murphysburg, residents of both communities voted to merge, and on March 23, 1873, the state legislature approved a special charter making the new town a fourth-class city. Four years later, the city commissioned Shober & Carqueville Lithographers of Chicago to produce a bird’s eye view of Joplin, and the firm hired Kansas City mapmaker Augustus Koch to draw it. Koch’s detailed map showed public schools, churches, mining furnaces and smelters, pump shafts, and the Joplin Hotel at Fourth and Main Streets, offering an early view of the community four years after incorporation, when the grid system was already in place but before the city’s streets, business districts, neighborhoods, and more substantial buildings spread far beyond the map’s early boundaries.