Where is Margrave in Reacher? The whole town was built on a cornfield after the pandemic scrapped the original plan

Margrave, Georgia — the corrupt little town at the center of Reacher season 1 — isn't on any map. It 's fictional, invented by Lee Child for his 1997 novel Killing Floor. And the version you see on screen isn't in Georgia either. It's a full-scale replica standing in a cornfield in Pickering, Ontario, about 25 miles east of Toronto.

Star Alan Ritchson broke the news himself when the show premiered in February 2022:

"Margrave is the Field of Dreams of sets, " Ritchson tweeted, admitting he might get killed for sharing the secret.

The pandemic scrapped the Georgia plan

The original intention was to shoot the real thing. Drew Brown, executive VP of production at Skydance Television, told The Hollywood Reporter in 2022 that the plan in the summer of 2020 was to film on location in an actual Georgia town. COVID-19 case numbers made that impossible, so production pivoted to Toronto — where cases were lower and where the studio could, in Brown's words, "build a replica Georgia town — and fully control it."

Control was the whole point. The site sat isolated from any neighbors, so outdoor scenes could run with few restrictions and fully managed access. According to Brown, the setup got the show through the entire season without a single shutdown.

What the crew actually built

This wasn't a couple of storefronts and some clever camera angles. The Margrave streetscape included:

• 30 stores and shops — built from scratch, most with vacant interiors behind the facades.
• A main square with a gazebo — the town's centerpiece in several episodes.
• A police station and town hall — where a good chunk of season 1 takes place.
• The Margrave diner, a barbershop, and a gas station — plus exactly one residential cottage.

The facades were a mix of painted foam and wood, and the whole thing sat on 23 acres inside a fenced-in 90-acre plot of farmland. Ritchson described the experience to IMDb: "you drive through the corn, and then all of a sudden you're in Margrave," comparing the effect to Pleasantville.

Not every Margrave scene came from the backlot. The night scene where Roscoe follows Jack in episode 2 was shot on Perry and Queen Streets in Port Perry, Ontario, and a car chase crash was staged in front of an insurance office in Ajax.

Read more: Who is Reacher based on? Lee Child's explanation — starting in a supermarket aisle

What happened to the set afterward

Reacher left Margrave behind after one season — the show adapts a different Child novel each year, so season 2 moved to New York (shot under the working title "Chimp"), and season 3 relocated to fictional Abbottsville, Maine. The town, however, stayed up.

Skydance, studio operator William F. White International, and the City of Pickering struck a deal to maintain and expand the site for other productions. WFW took a long-term lease on the city-owned land — running through December 2026 — reinforced the foam-and-wood facades with steel bases and exterior cladding to survive Ontario winters, and turned it into the biggest backlot in Canada. The period drama Murdoch Mysteries has already used it, redressing Margrave as Niagara Falls circa the 1890s.

For the record: a fake Georgia town, built in Canada because of a pandemic, now has a longer-term production deal than most actual TV shows.

Earlier we wrote: Your guide to Neagley’s cast: characters and actors in the upcoming crime series