Aviation History Before Aviation History

Leonardo Da Hunter? Or Orville or Wilbur Hunter?

Anytime I come across a claim for fame for me I am sure to let you know. I think I have proven that.

In this case, I am a relative to someone who is a relative who invented the flying machine before Wilbur and Orville Wright.

I am qualified to talk about first attempts of aviation. Anna and I took a walking tour with a park ranger at the Wright Brothers Memorial at Kitty Hawk or Kill Devil Hill – those two communities kind of blend together, but by the tour I learned all there is to know about early aviation.

EXCEPT:
One of my Hunter distant Hunter relatives in Union County, Georgia near Blairsville, married a person with the surname Dyer.

And that Dyer person was related to Micager Clark Dyer (1822 – 1891).

Micager Clark Dyer was working on aviation machines long before the Wright Brothers.

Here is what Patricia Davis Everett said about Micager in the Union County Heritage 1832-1994, article number 410:

He was considered a mechanical genius. He was believed to be the first person in Union County to have running water, using hollow trees and later metal pipes, by gravity flow. He invented and patented a perpetual motion machine, that he after he died, was offered $30,000, for it, but his son Mancil refused. He also built a flying machine, small, that was reported to fly. After his death Morena sold the model to Redwine Brothers in Atlanta.

In the weekly newspaper column Mountain Mists by Ethlene Dyer Jones, Mrs. Jones tells of the mechanical genius Micager Clark Dyer and said Highway 180 will be soon named the Micager Clark Dyer Highway. She tells M.C. was more or less a reclusive from his neighbors, he needed the privacy to work on his projects. She told some of his eccentric ways handed down through the family and also it is believed that the Redwine Brothers of Atlanta turned over the designs and calculations to the Wright Brothers who used it in their famous flight in 1903.

There’s history in them thar hills!