Was Named for Micajah Clark Dyer
Sixteen years ago Georgia Highway 180-East from U.S. Highway 19/129 to the Brasstown Bald Mountain Spur was named the Micajah Clark Dyer Parkway to honor a pioneer aviator and inventor by that name. Members of the Dyer family went to the Capitol to witness Governor Sonny Perdue signing the Resolution naming the road. The youngest family member present for the signing was James Micajah Cooper, a fourth great grandson of Micajah Clark Dyer. He is shown in the photo above with the Governor hoisting him in the air with one hand, astonishing the assembled group.
James was recently in Union County visiting his grandparents, David and Geraldine Dyer Coker. Now seventeen, he is pictured here with his sister, Esther Cooper. and his four cousins, Ada, Danner, Gideon and Gabriel Jones, all of whom have been born since the road was named to pay tribute to their outstanding ancestor who invented and flew an aircraft, for which he was granted a patent in 1874, twenty-nine years before the Wright brothers made their historic flight at Kill Devil Hill in North Carolina in 1903. James is a junior at Wesleyan School in Atlanta and clearly has come a long way from that day when Governor Perdue gave him a surprise lift!
The Union County Historical Society Museum in the Old Courthouse on the square in Blairsville has an exhibit of a model of Micajah Clark Dyer’s flying machine that was built by Jack Allen and donated to the museum in 2006.
