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There is a patent—No. 154,654, dated September 1, 1874—granted to one Micajah Clark Dyer for “an apparatus for navigating the air.” Did Dyer really get sufficiently airborne off a mountain in Union County, Georgia, about a quarter century before the Wright Brothers, to qualify for first flight?
Stories say Micajah Clark Dyer flew like an eagle about a generation before the Wright Brothers’ fabled first flight on the Outer Banks of North Carolina in 1903.
But not everybody thought Dyer was sane in doing so. In fact, one newspaper writer thought Dyer may have been ready for a room at a mental hospital after he allegedly took flight in the isolated mountains of Georgia’s Union County in 1875.
For decades, Sylvia Dyer Turnage heard such stories about Dyer, her great-great grandfather. But that’s all she figured they may have been: family legend and lore. Great material. But how do you prove it?
Then one of her nephews made it a point to research Dyer. Turnage, in turn, got so interested that she self-published a couple of small books, in 1994 and 2009, about her ancestor’s aviation aspirations.
As it turns out, says Turnage, a retired accountant, the old family stories have appeared to be true.
“He flew off Rattlesnake Mountain,” Turnage contends. “There’s no way to really know how far he flew. But he flew enough that he impressed everybody that they talked about it for over 100 years with nothing written or pictured or anything.”
Today, a monument at Dyer’s grave in Union County notes him as “a genius who lived and died in obscurity but who left behind a rich legacy in the field of aeronautics.”
Dyer was born on July 13, 1822 in Pendleton, South Carolina. His family settled in Union County, Georgia, when Dyer was still a boy. He came from a family of farmers. And that’s what he was, too: a farmer.
Still, he must have been a dreamer.
“They said he watched the birds fly and thought, ‘You know, there’s no reason why a man can’t do that, too,’” Turnage says. “And so he began to work with different things in an attempt to get something to fly and figure out what caused flight, how to get up there, then how to steer when you got up there and then how to come down safely.”
But to fly like an eagle was not considered a sane idea by the general public, Turnage says. “They just could not conceive of something that could fly in the air. It was a crazy idea back in the 1800s.”
Still, Dyer persisted in his plans. And to make his invention come to life, Turnage says, this dreamer used whatever materials were available. “And he managed to do all this without the usual education or connections. He never went to school above the seventh grade.”
Jack Allen, of Blairsville, Georgia, has brought Dyer’s drawings to life—in miniature.
Allen built a model in 2013, according to Dyer’s plans, as a gift that is now on display at the Union County Historical Society Museum in Blairsville.
“They needed somebody to build a model,” he says, “so they contacted me.”
Good thing: Allen is a retired airline machinist. “I worked on airplanes most of my life,” says Allen, 79. “I fly myself. And I’m always interested in things that fly.”