DAR introduced to Clark Dyer's flying machine

Pictured above: The Presenters at the DAR meeting in Blairsville on Sept. 23, 2006

On September 23, 2006, Sylvia Dyer Turnage introduced The Old Unicoi Trail Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution to a piece of history that most of them had never heard of, the invention of a “flying machine” by Micajah Clark Dyer in the Choestoe District of Union County. She showed them a copy of his Patent No. 154,654 issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on September 1, 1874, for his “Apparatus for Navigating the Air.” She related the stories told by eyewitnesses of seeing Clark Dyer fly his machine off Rattlesnake Mountain and across his field about a quarter of a century before the Wright Brothers flew their plane at Kitty Hawk, NC in 1903. Sylvia expressed her desire to get the craft reproduced and placed in a museum, and to have the history books include this important contribution to aviation.


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