R. E. Hayes, senior member of Hayes & Black, a firm dealing in grain and agricultural implements in Pollock, Campbell County, was born on December 24, 1862, in Erie County, Pennsylvania. He was educated in Pennsylvania’s public schools and moved to South Dakota in 1882 to join his uncle, J. L. Thompson. After various business ventures in Vanderbilt and North Dakota, Hayes assisted in a trading business at the Cheyenne Indian Agency. In 1901, he relocated to Pollock, where he and his partner, David Black, established a successful grain and agricultural implement business, earning widespread respect in the community.
R. E. Hayes, senior member of the firm of Hayes & Black, dealers in grain and agricultural implements in Pollock, Campbell County, merits mention in this work as one of the representative businessmen of this section of the state.
Mr. Hayes is a native of the old Keystone state, having been born in Erie County, Pennsylvania, on the 24th of December 1862. The subject was reared in his native county and his educational advantages were those afforded in its public schools. He continued to reside in Pennsylvania until 1882, when he came to what is now the state of South Dakota, where he joined his uncle, J. L. Thompson, who had come here two years previously and located on a ranch near Vanderbilt, on the Missouri River. Our subject remained with his uncle for one year and thereafter passed one year in a store on Beaver Creek, North Dakota. He then returned to Vanderbilt, where he continued in the same line of enterprise and also engaged in the cattle business until 1894, when he went to the Cheyenne Indian agency, where he assisted in the conduct of a trading business there conducted by J. E. Horton. One and one-half years later Mr. Hayes removed to Eureka, McPherson County, where he engaged in the buying and shipping of grain until the autumn of 1901, when he came to Pollock. He removed to this place a warehouse from Eureka, transporting the building on wagons, and bought the first grain ever shipped from this station, the same being stored on the ground while the weight was determined by guessing as definitely as possible. His partner, David Black, accompanied him from Eureka, and they have been since associated in business. Pollock has become an important station for the shipping of grain, and in addition to this important feature of their business, the firm also handles agricultural implements and machinery, flour, coal, etc., and they have built up a prosperous industry and gained the unqualified confidence and esteem of the people of the section covered by their operations.
Source: Robinson, Doane, History of South Dakota: together with mention of Citizens of South Dakota, [Logansport? IN] : B. F. Bowen, 1904.