Midway

I've written at least a couple of times before about the phenomenon of towns that changed their names. Another such town is the current town of Jasper, Missouri, which started out as Midway. Located in northern Jasper County near the Barton County border, the town was founded in 1868 and took the place of an earlier settlement by the same name on the other side of the border in Barton County. Both communities got their names because of the fact that they were approximately halfway between the established towns of Carthage and Lamar. In 1876, a post office was established at Midway and called Jasper, supposedly so that it could utilize the equipment of a defunct post office named Jasper that had previously existed for a short while southeast of Carthage. (In the 1870s, a community named Knights existed at or near the same location southeast of Carthage where the first Jasper had been, but I'm not sure whether they were the same place.) After Midway changed its name to Jasper, it was often called Jasper City to distinguish it from the county in which it was located, but nowadays it is just called Jasper.