QUINCY, WASH. — When the wind blows across the arid river basin, dust swirls and scatters over the sun-heated earth of this small farming town, sneaking into buildings on pant legs and the tops of shoes.
Once the dust settles, someone invariably walks into Dan Gates' hardware store on E Street looking for a push broom and a box of a cleaning compound called Kleen Sweep. Gates used to sell about a box a week. Lately he has been selling boxes by the pallet.
"My customer count is higher, transactions are up, my inventory is up," said Gates, owner of the local True Value franchise.
It's a good customer who buys Kleen Sweep by the ton -- which is how Gates came to appreciate the people down the road who are building a data center, the town's third.
Rural America -- particularly the inland Northwest, where wind- and water-generated electricity is some of the cheapest in the nation -- is suddenly coveted by technology companies. They construct sprawling buildings with massive computer servers, the hidden muscle and bone that process the seemingly weightless, rapidly growing data of people's everyday lives. The technology that supports technology is strikingly old-fashioned: cast-iron pipes, reinforced concrete, sheet-metal ductwork.
Dust is the sworn enemy of computer equipment. When crews from software maker Intuit needed to clean up during construction, they went to Gates' store.
"My goal is to keep people from going out of town," Gates said. That means stocking shotguns, rakes, cases of Mountain Dew, coolers, softball bats and as much Kleen Sweep as he can find.
For a town like Quincy, built on potatoes and apples, the arrival of high tech has proved an inspirational and a cautionary tale.
With its two stoplights, four banks and almost 6,000 residents -- two-thirds of them Latino, many of whom work the fields, orchards, vineyards and packing plants -- Quincy seemed an unlikely destination for the likes of Intuit, or Microsoft and Yahoo, which also have built data centers in town. The median income ($35,000) and the median price of a home ($108,000) are far below the state medians. Unemployment is relatively high and education levels relatively low -- typical of the divide between Washingtonians east of the Cascade Mountains and those west of them.
Still, Quincy has done better than many small towns. Some believe the high-tech utilities -- which town officials courted -- will further transform it.
