JAMES HAYES

Sacramento County

Biographies

JAMES HAYES

JAMES HAYES.--The interesting correlation of commercial and agricultural affairs and success of James Hayes, the retired butcher and fruit rancher, who hails from Audrain County, Mo., where he was born on April, 15, 1868, the son of Robert McCoy and Caroline Cornelia (Thomas) Hayes, farmer-folk,, making a specialty of milling. The elder Hayes has long since closed his useful career; but Mrs. Hayes is still living. James Hayes attended the country school in rural Missouri, and after that helped his father on the farm. He left home at the age of fourteen, to work for wages, in order to get money to pay his way to California; and when about seventeen, he managed to migrate to the Coast, and on his arrival here, he went to work for Messrs. Pauley & Son, at Tehachapi, where he continued for some six years. Then he went north to Oregon and Washington, where he worked as a butcher, and later he returned to Tehachapi. Coming back to Pauley & Son’s, he was with them for two years; and then he came to Lincoln, and remained for six years.

In 1898 Mr. Hayes came to Elk Grove, attracted by its certain future prospect, and showed his faith by buying out a butcher shop and engaging in that business, continuing actively until in August, 1922, when he sold the business and leased the building. As the pioneer merchant in the town he is naturally entitled to all the honors accompanying that distinction. Not only did Mr. Hayes conduct his market, but he developed a fine prune orchard near his slaughter-house and those eleven acres are now coming into bearing. He retired from commercial activity because he wished to develop his new forty-acre ranch located about three miles northeast from Elk Grove, where he has set out an orchard of prunes and peaches and here he now makes his home, having moved his city home onto his ranch. He has a fine system of irrigation with concrete pipes throughout the ranch and a deep well that he pumps by electric motor.

Mr. Hayes has been married three times. By his first wife, who was Miss Mamie Slattery in maidenhood, he had a son, William Edward Hayes, now of New York City. His second union was with Miss Nellie Drake and they had a daughter, Dean Hayes, now living in San Francisco. For his third wife he chose Mrs. Hattie Graham, daughter of Dr. James Caples, an esteemed pioneer, and she shares with Mr. Hayes the admiration of a wide circle of friends. Mr. Hayes is a stanch Republican and a public-spirited citizen of Sacramento County.

Transcribed by Priscilla J. Delventhal.

Source: Reed, G. Walter, History of Sacramento County, California With Biographical Sketches, Page 555. Historic Record Company, Los Angeles, CA. 1923.