Many other land claims were filed between May and October. In October John Franklin Black (1861-1954) claimed a 160-acre homestead where the town of Quincy is located today, setting up a tent for his family. Clay (1852-1916) of Spokane made a homestead claim of 166.71 acres two miles north of the future townsite. The open range was coming to an end once the Great Northern completed construction in Washington in 1893. to help construct the transcontinental line. The first people to live at the Quincy siding were railroad builders from all over world who had been given passage to the U.S. The train would bring a flood of homesteaders into Quincy and surrounding areas, establishing communities there. The siding was a place for trains to pass, identified by a name attached to a post.

Quincy started as a whistle stop, a railroad siding and signpost located along the tracks. The first railroad construction camp, serving as a center for the railroad crews laying tracks in the area, was at Trinidad, located on top of a bluff overlooking the Columbia River seven miles west of Quincy. The settlement of Quincy began with the Great Northern's arrival, which opened the way for growth. By 1892, the Great Northern Railway was completing construction of its transcontinental line across the northern part of the state. There were no railroads in the region until 1889, the same year Washington was admitted as the 42nd state. Blythe is credited with several area firsts - including establishing the first viable irrigation system in addition to the early automobile, but he had lost the fortune by the time of his death in 1930. A native of Scotland, the life-long bachelor was called 'Lord Blythe' behind his back because of his education at Oxford, conservatively tailored attire, well-equipped home with servants, and later, when roads came into use, having one of the area's first automobiles, referred to by some as a glass coach.īlythe successfully entered the cattle business, making a fortune on large amounts of land he owned in Douglas County between the Columbia River and Moses Lake. The land attracted some of the toughest cattlemen, among them Thomas Smart Blythe (1853-1930) who arrived in Eastern Washington in 1884. The soil was fertile enough to produce crops such as wheat but without sufficient water, agriculture was not considered an option for a period of time. Vegetation was largely sagebrush and a variety of grasses, and the region was prone to fires and cold winters. Depending upon the weather, it could be riddled with predators and potential pests, including rattlesnakes, coyotes, and jackrabbits. When the first non-Native settlers, cattle ranchers, and sheepherders reached the Big Bend region of Central Washington in the mid-1800s, the future Quincy area was dry and desert-like, seen as barren by many. The settlement that became Quincy was established in what was then Douglas County, which had been carved out of Lincoln County on November 28, 1883, just days after Lincoln County was separated from Spokane County. Quincy grew through the years, reaching a population of 7,830 by 2022. In the twenty-first century, the ample inexpensive electricity generated by the dams led to development of a new industry, large data centers operated by Microsoft, Yahoo!, and other tech companies. But it was not until the middle of the twentieth century, when irrigation water from Grand Coulee and other area dams turned the dry land around Quincy into some of the most productive farmland in the country, that it became an agricultural and food-processing center.

More homesteaders began arriving in the first years of the 1900s.

Quincy began as a stop on the Great Northern Railway line completed through the region in 1892. It is about 10 miles north of I-90, seven miles east of the Columbia River, and 35 miles west of Moses Lake. Quincy is a city in Grant County near the heart of Central Washington in a region sometimes known as the Big Bend Country.

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