The area called Murphy, some would say, stretched from the St. Louis County line in Fenton to west of Brennan Road in what is now High Ridge, according to Della Lang in her book On the Road to History. The unincorporated area included a post office, a store and a small neighborhood. It is one of the lost neighborhoods that’s really not lost because people who live in what once was the heart of Murphy still know it, and many still remember Murphy’s Store.
John M. Murphy came to the Saline Creek area with his brothers, Eugene and Frank, from Cahokia, Ill. He married Margaret Everett sometime around 1875. Then he opened a store.
The year he opened the store is up for debate, but the day he died is not. John Murphy passed away on Sept. 1, 1889. He was 42 years old and was not expecting to die it seems. Two weeks earlier he was planning for the future and purchased 75 acres of land with a $500 loan from Charles Heller.
His wife Margaret was left alone to care for their three children: Frances Eugenia, 13; John Joseph, 11; and Mary Adelle, 9. While she had to sell some land to pay the family’s debts, she still had the store and, apparently, she was a good storekeeper. Business was good, good enough that she expanded the building.
She also was granted the right to open a post office in 1894 and named the community Murphy in honor of her late husband. Margaret Murphy was both the first and last postmaster, however; the post office closed in 1906 when mail began to be delivered through the Valley Park Post Office.
Times were changing, and Murphy was going with the flow. When automobiles started pulling up at the general store, she put in a gasoline pump. But, she had nothing to do with the moonshine still that was found near Murphy’s store and raided in 1920 during Prohibition. Neighbors said the perpetrators were not local people but Italians who drove out from the city. Mrs. Murphy might have sold beer, though, during the legislated drought.
“According to one former customer, Margaret placed a broom on the front porch as a signal to her customers that beer had been delivered,” Lang wrote.
Margaret Murphy died in 1932, and her daughter, Frances Vogelsang, took over the job of running the store. After that, Frances’ son, Joseph, took over running the store till sometime in the 1960s. The store finally closed in the early 1970s. The Haug family was its final owners.
The store was torn down to make way for the new Hwy. 30, and its former location is under the pavement of the westbound lane of Hwy. 30 at New Sugar Creek Road, according to Lang.
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