There are many avenues of business and employment open to women, but the flour, feed and coal establishment conducted by Miss Frances Hay, of Clyde, is rather out of the ordinary, but this intelligent young business woman has demonstrated that good management is more to be desired and more essential than the muscular strength of the opposite sex.

Miss Hay embarked in this enterprise August 13, 1901, and has built up a lucrative trade. She is a daughter of G.W. Hay, who was among the very early homestead settlers of the Sibley neighborhood. During the Indian uprisings the family removed to Iowa. Returning a year later Mr. Hay bought a pre-emption claim of a man named Simon, one mile east of Clyde, where his family of five daughters grew to womanhood. Their mother died while these children were young and their father married again. By the second marriage there was one daughter and two sons. Their father, G.W. Hay, died in 1887.

Clara, the eldest daughter, was one of the early Cloud county teachers. She taught two years in the Clyde schools. She is now Mrs. Miller, of Clifton. The other daughters are Eva, wife of W.L. Brandon (see sketch). Ella, wife of L.B. Haynes, a harnessmaker of Salina, Kansas, and Inez, wife of T.M. Brown, of Walsenburg, Colorado. Mrs. Brown has clerked in several of the different stores in Clyde and for several years was engaged in the millinery business in Hebron, Nebraska, and Ellsworth, Kansas. She was married in June, 1902.

Miss Frances Hay's early educational advantages were good and she held a position as assistant in the county clerk's office during Charles Proctor's reign and in the district clerk's office with Mr. Hostetler. She taught school successively for several years, beginning when very young. She was one of the first corps of instructors in the Miltonvale school building. In 1901 she did kindergarten work in Lincoln, Nebraska.