To Jacob Hay is due in largest degree the extension and improvement of the modern city of Easton. In 1871, just a century after his great-grandfather Melchoir Hay had purchased the land upon which now stands South Easton, Jacob Hay bought one hundred acres west of Twelfth street — much of it outside the town limits and considered by many as too remote for his purposes — and set it apart for high-class residential uses, spending large amounts of money in grading and beautifying it, and creating a central park with beautiful shade trees and shrubbery and intersected by spacious driveways, one of the latter being the handsomest residence avenue in Easton, now Fourteenth street. Mr. Hay built in the first year an elegant residence; ten years later it was burned down (the family narrowly escaping death) and was replaced by a larger and more beautiful edifice. Friends, one after another — William Laubach, Floyd S. Bixler, Major Thomas L. McKeen, Herman Simon, William Gould Heller, C. M. Hapgood, and others — moved into the Hays neighborhood, and it became what it is today, the most beautiful portion of the city of Easton. Mr. Hays' expenditures in the work of improvement amounted to about $150,000, and were largely in the interest of the public at large, who are free to use the drives and walks. Mr. Hay was one of the early and most enterprising merchants of Easton. He was founder of the first wholesale dry goods house in Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia and Pittsburg, founded in 1866, upon his return from the Civil war, and of the wholesale boot and shoe house of Hapgood, Hay & Company, founded in 1875. His ardent patriotism during the Civil war period found characteristic illustration in 1863, when the state was threatened with invasion by the rebel army under General Lee. Mr. Hay exhorted his employees to go home and prepare themselves to do duty with the emergency forces called out, informing them that their salaries would be continued. He then ordered the shutters of his large, dry goods establishment to but up, and the store closed. Friends placed upon the door a sign reading: "Not closed by the sheriff, but gone to the war." A company was recruited from his own men and the class of 1863 of Lafayette, which he commanded at a critical time.