This is another town to which the Columbia Basin irrigation development contributed new life, where previously farmers and ranchers struggled to flourish. Two significant structures remain of the early settlement, the vernacular Reiman House, once the anchor of a 20-acre farmstead, today home to the Quincy Valley Historical Society & Museum, and Saint Paul’s German Lutheran Church, which underwent a move and a complete restoration and is a community gathering place.

Prior to the irrigation project, the sun beat down on shadeless streets, and pungent winds with the odor of sage swept up from the canyon and coulee. It was anticipated that as the fifties advanced and irrigation arrived, a refreshing moisture would hang on the air, and rich green growth would come to the fields. This part of the Columbia Basin was, for years, a land of promise and a graveyard of hopes. Despite the lightness of precipitation, which is seldom more than six inches annually, productive farms and flourishing stock ranches have been maintained on the deep soil, rich in nitrates, lime, and magnesium. Scattered along the highway are ghost farms with their deserted houses, weather-beaten barns, and uprooted skeletons of fruit trees, a tragic residue left by settlers, who, at the turn of the century, hopefully broke the land and waited for the promised irrigation to materialize. The dream which they dreamed too soon finally became a reality.

Directly south of the town are the rugged hummocks of Frenchman Hills, scene of unsuccessful attempts to strike oil, across a treeless rugged plateau. Westward lies the long line of the Wenatchee Range, blue in the haze.