<p>Vendor booths and demonstrations fill the streets during the Shaniko Wool Gathering. The 2012 event includes a pioneer and artisan faire.</p>

What normally seems a sleepy little ghost town will bustle with activity as it hosts the Shaniko Wool Gathering: Pioneer & Artisan Faire.

In celebration of the towns wool heritage, Shaniko has embraced the opportunity to provide a rendezvous/marketplace for wool growers and fiber artists. The event will include sheep to shawl demonstrations, a petting zoo, herding dog demonstrations, fiber artists and vendors.

The Shaniko Wool Gathering: Pioneer & Artisan Faire is Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Shaniko is about 140 miles from Hermiston. To get to there, drive on Interstate 84 and take Exit 104 at Biggs Junction, then continue south for about 55 miles on Highway 97.

Special tours of the Imperial Stock Ranch, which cost $10 per person, are Sunday from 12:30-3 p.m.

The festival, in its sixth year, also features wool products, a quilt raffle, prizes, quilt displays, quilting, sewing and stitching crafts, homestead/pioneering skills and demonstrations, artisan offerings, photography and painting contests, pioneer camp and blacksmithing, leather craft and woodworking. Visitors are encouraged to check out Shaniko museums and historic buildings.

A lamb dinner will serve as a 4-H fundraiser Saturday at 5 p.m. and the Chamber of Commerce will host lunches both days.

Established in 1900, Shaniko was a railroad terminus that earned the title of the largest inland wool shipping center in the world by 1903. With wool sales in the millions of dollars and increased shipping volumes, Shaniko was referred to as the Wool Capital of the World. Richard Roland Hinton, who had come to the nearby Bakeoven Area several decades earlier, developed a breed of sheep called the Columbia. His famous Imperial Stock Ranch and descendants of his breed still exist today. Shaniko had two large warehouses, a part of one which still stands.

Shaniko is still classified as a ghost town even though people still live there, said Debra Holbrook of the Shaniko Preservation Guild. Once a place of legitimate community and commerce, it now exists as a shadow of its former existence, she said. Ghost towns are categorized into three types: one still inhabited, one deserted and one known only by the ground it once occupied, Holbrook explained in a press release.

For more information about this weekends event, go to www.shanikowoolgathering.com, www.facebook.com/shanikowool or call 541-489-3434. Shanikos website is www.shanikooregon.com.