Half.com is history, but Halfway lives on with small-town charm and small-town problems - oregonlive.com
The town is hoping to raise more money to fix its rickety fairgrounds grandstand, weakened by frost heave and needing $107,000 in repairs. The grandstand recently was condemned, and Halfway residents hope to raise $107,000 to repair it in time for the ranching community's big event of the year, the three-day Baker County Fair and Panhandle Rodeo on Labor Day weekend. ... as the tiny town that became famous as the world's first "Internet city" when it changed its name toThe latest misfortune comes on top of losing the fair pavilion -- the biggest building in the town of 288 -- eight years ago at a sheriff's auction when the community couldn't afford to pay for its construction. (The pavilion's new owner lets the fair association use it to show animals each year during the fair and rodeo.) ... These days, the on-going fairgrounds saga is what passes for excitement in Halfway -- shoehorned into the Pine Valley, 55 miles east of Baker City and a short distance from the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area and the Eagle Cap Wilderness.Among the granite mountains above town is the old Cornucopia Mine, one of Oregon's richest post-frontier gold mines, now boarded up. The town has a motel, two grocery stores, a bank, an RV park, three restaurants and several bed and breakfasts. Nobody's sure what Halfway's name really means.The best guess is that the town, which dates to 1887, was midway between the old settlement of Pine and the Cornucopia mine. But notions persist that its moniker derived from being between Baker City and Cornucopia, Pine and Carson, Baker City and Brownlee and Brownlee and Cornucopia. Nobody knows. Whatever the truth is, Halfway landed on the world stage in 2000 when it changed its name to Half.com in exchange for $73,000 from a Philadelphia-based Internet bazaar of the same name that sold movies, CDs, books and the like online at half price.
