John Stillwell Stark 

John Stillwell Stark (b. Shelby County, Kentucky, April 11, 1841 – d. St. Louis, November 20, 1927) – Publisher of ragtime music.  Born into a Kentucky family of twelve children, Stark went to live on his older brother’s farm in Gosport, Indiana, at age six. After growing up in Gosport, he joined the Union Army and was a bugler during the Civil War.  Following the war’s end, he started a family in Gosport with his wife, whom he met during his military duty. In 1869, he uprooted his family from a family farm in Indiana to Missouri, where he continued to farm at first but moved on to the ice cream business and music retail of pianos and organs.  After settling in Sedalia, Missouri in 1885, he opened John Stark and Son (the Son being fifteen-year old William) and got his start in the music publishing business. After hearing a gigging pianist named Scott Joplin play a catchy number at the Maple Leaf Club on August 10, 1899, he made a business proposition that changed his life and secured him a place in history.  Stark bought the rights for the unnamed song for fifty dollars on the agreement that Joplin would also get a penny for every sold copy of sheet music. On September 18, 1899, “The Maple Leaf Rag” was published by John Stark and Son and became the first instrumental publication to sell over one million copies. The blockbuster success of “The Maple Leaf Rag” allowed Stark to expand his business ventures to St. Louis and New York (1905), and he moved on to promote and publish the music of ragtime composers Joseph Lamb, James Scott, Arthur Marshall, Paul Pratt, Artie Matthews, J. Russell Robinson (a well-known Hoosier), and his son Etilmon J. Stark.  The death of Stark’s wife in 1910 and the stiff competition from Tin Pan Alley publishers caused him to close his New York office and focus on his St. Louis operations, which shut down in 1922 (long after ragtime had lost favor to jazz).