Harrison G. Dyar, Jr., Entomologist and Tunneler

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
Wilson. So this episode started when I was just, you know,
scrolling on my phone as you do, and I came
across a video about hobby tunnelers that was made by
Connor Cleary. If you don't know him, Clary is a
potter who is also a marvelous dry wit, and he
comments on various cultural and historical things in his videos.
You can find him on TikTok and Instagram, and I

(00:35):
just find him hilarious. But in this hobby tunneling video
that he made, which was prompted by a current case
involving a woman who has been tunneling out a bunker
under her house and has documented all of it on TikTok,
he mentioned Harrison Dyer as a famous case of a
hobby tunneler, and so I was like, hmm, And when
I looked up Harrison Dyer, there was just so much

(00:56):
other stuff that I was like, I am fully enthralled
with this and I want to spend a lot of
time with it, because there's science there's contentious issues with
other scientists, there's bigamy, there's a lot of drama without
the tunneling, and then there's also tunneling. Like just one
of the headlines that I found right away when I
was looking at newspaper archives was one that read Harrison G.

(01:20):
Dyer said to be greatest living authority on bugs is
in court and that was a divorce case. There are
so much more about him. There is a really good
biography of Harrison Dyer that was written by Mark Epstein,
who is also an entomologist, as Dyer was. That came
out in twenty sixteen, and Epstein at one point in
an interview said, quote, you could choose just one aspect

(01:41):
and easily write a book the size of mine.

Speaker 1 (01:44):
And he is so right. But we're going to try
to talk about it in broader strokes, and there's a
ton of stuff that got shunted to the behind the
scenes notes. That book, incidentally, in case you want to
look for it and get a much more robust version
of this story, is called Smiths and Mosquitoes, The Eccentric
Life of Harrison G. Dyer. If you are a library user,

(02:05):
you might want to look at the library. It is
kind of expensive at this point, like it didn't get
it doesn't appear to have gotten a paperback edition, and
so it's only the hardcover and sometimes those are hard
to find secondhand and they're still pretty pricey. And then
the actual new ones are like seventy dollars or something.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
They're a lot I think it's also from an academic press,
and a lot of times those are a bit more
expensive too. Yes, even the digital version is pricey. Yeah, yeah,
So get thee to your local library.

Speaker 1 (02:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:41):
And if your local public library is like, I don't
know what you're talking about, see if you're part of
a network that also includes a couple university libraries, and
sometimes you can get it that way.

Speaker 1 (02:53):
Yes, get that inner library loan going.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:56):
So.

Speaker 2 (02:57):
Harrison Gray Dyer Junior was born February fourteenth, eighteen sixty six,
in New York City. His mother was Eleanora Rosella Hannam Dyer,
and his father, Harrison Dyer Senior, was a scientist. Dyer
Senior had done well for himself. He almost beat Samuel
Morse to the patent for the telegraph. He made his

(03:18):
money patenting various die formulas. So young Harrison was born
into a financially pretty comfortable life. Harrison Senior died when
Dyer was still a boy. Though he and his sister
Pearl grew up among spiritualists, Eleanora and her sisters were
all believers. A woman named Lucy Hudson also lived with them.

(03:39):
Lucy was a homeopath. She was described as an ant
in this family's structure, but she doesn't really seem to
have been a blood relative.

Speaker 1 (03:49):
When Harrison Senior died, the family was living in Rhinebeck,
New York, and as a young boy, Harrison Junior would
hike in the woods near the Hudson River and catalog
insects and other interesting things that he saw in nature.
He was a collector from the beginning, and his sister
often went with him, and these preliminary notes would expand
once he returned home, and he would often add sketches

(04:12):
as well, and sometimes watercolors. From those earliest days, he
was especially interested in moths and their caterpillars. And then
the family moved to Boston, where Dyer attended the Roxbury
Latin School, which is a private school for boys that
was founded in sixteen forty five and still exists. He
moved on from there to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,

(04:32):
and he got a bachelor's degree in chemistry there. When
Dyer was twenty two, his mother, Eleanora, died and Harrison
had inherited a very nice fortune.

Speaker 2 (04:42):
In the fall of eighteen eighty nine, Dyer got married
to Zella Peabody. Zella was a music teacher from Los Angeles.
We don't know how the two of them met, but
it's believed they were both living in Boston at the time.
Zella had moved to Los Angeles in eighteen eighty SI
and then started sending Harrison these Lepidopteris specimens from out

(05:04):
on the West Coast. A lot of these she had
raised herself from caterpillars. While Dyer was in the middle
of an eight month collecting trip in Colorado, he went
to Los Angeles for their wedding. The Dyer's honeymoon was
a specimen collecting trip. I love all of this. Unfortunately
it does not it's so charming.

Speaker 1 (05:25):
Don't get attached.

Speaker 2 (05:26):
Yeah, it's not predicting a happy and compatible marriage for them.
This couple had two children. There was a son named
Otis and a daughter named Dorothy.

Speaker 1 (05:38):
In eighteen ninety, Dyer published his first scientific paper titled
the Number of Molts of Lepidopteris Larvae. This paper, published
in Psyche, a journal of entomology, opens by noting other
papers that had been published and that quote it is
evident from a perusal of them that considerable confusion exists
as to the number of molts of certain species. Dyer's

(06:00):
approach to counting molts involved measuring the width of the
heads of the larvae of butterflies and moths to determine
where they were in their molt cycle. He noted that
adding a record of width of the head should become
standard in any research related to the molting of lepidoptera.

Speaker 2 (06:19):
This work became really influential in the entomology world, and
the measurement of larval heads to track their life cycles
was adopted. The work he had done to correlate headsize
to life cycle using a constant ratio came to be
known as Dyer's law. This remains important in entomological work.

(06:40):
It's not a perfect formula, just as with Sir Edmund
Halley's population table we talked about recently in our Actuarial
Science episode, the data kind of smoothed out a little
bit but this applies to roughly eighty percent of lepidoptera species.

Speaker 1 (06:57):
Yeah, so you can basically look at larvae of something,
see its headwidth related to his body length, and go, oh,
this is probably at this point in its developmental cycle,
and it's pretty accurate. In eighteen ninety one, Harrison and
Zella were once again on the move collecting specimens. On
these trips, normally Zella assisted her husband, and then after

(07:19):
their return from this long win in eighteen ninety one,
Dier next went to Columbia University for an advanced degree
in biology. He got his master's degree there and then
continued to finish his PhD, which he did in eighteen
ninety five. His focus for his PhD had been bacteriology,
specifically the bacteria in the air in New York City.

(07:40):
His next step was to work as an assistant bacteriologist
at Columbia's medical school, and after two years in that job,
he then went to the United States National Museum to
study insects. This is interesting because it's not exactly a
job offer, and it's an example of how Harrison's familial
wealth really enabled him to do as he wished. Because

(08:02):
he was not paid at the National Museum. Although he
was given a title of Honorary Custodian of Lepidoptera.

Speaker 2 (08:09):
Dyer could work without needing to be paid because he
had that money from his inheritance, and with it he
made various investments, particularly in real estate. We've talked so
many times about how a lot of the wealthiest families
in the US made a lot of their money by
purchasing and then selling or leasing real estate in New

(08:30):
York and other rapidly growing cities. Dyer did the same thing.
He continued to acquire real estate throughout his life. He
often bought multiple properties at the same time. One newspaper
entry from the Washington DC Evening Star in March of
nineteen oh six, for example, lists real estate sales made

(08:51):
through the firm of Early in Lambton in the preceding days.
Dyer is listed twice, having acquired a property called the
Ashbourne for fifes two thousand dollars and an empty lot
on Harvard Street between thirteenth and fourteenth for twenty five
hundred dollars. Some of his investments were rental properties, some
were lots that he built on, and some he just

(09:13):
held until it was a good time to sell them
off at an appreciated value, so he had regular income
to support himself and his family without needing the museum
to pay him while he conducted research into lepidoptera. This
also meant he was really able to self direct his work.
Not getting paid meant that he didn't really have to

(09:33):
answer to anyone, and the work he.

Speaker 1 (09:36):
Was doing in his honorary role was important to the museum.
It was something that they needed somebody to do. He
was really managing their collection of specimens, and that meant
that he was organizing it, notating it. He was also
acquiring new specimens and culling any that weren't really beneficial
to the collection, So those calls were things like duplicates

(09:56):
or poorly preserved samples that weren't going to be of
scientific value.

Speaker 2 (10:00):
But Dyer also studied insects outside of the order of Leptoptera,
and one of these, the mosquito, became an important part
of Dyer's legacy. This work caused a lot of problems
with Dyer's frequent collaborator, John Bernhardt Smith, who was working
on mosquito research before Dyer got involved. The two of

(10:22):
them bickered over naming conventions, and projects that overlapped, and
specimen collection, really anything that came up regarding mosquito research.
All of this was going on as that research was
becoming very important because the United States became involved in
the construction on the Panama Canal, meaning mosquitos were a

(10:44):
very real problem. In the time that the French had
been working on the canal, twenty two thousand workers had died,
and a lot of those deaths were from yellow fever
and malaria. Dyre collaborated with several other scientists on research
about mosquitoes that ultimately expanded practical knowledge of their life

(11:05):
cycles and behavioral habits that enabled the United States to
implement some control measures that helped eliminate yellow fever deaths
in the workforce.

Speaker 1 (11:17):
Dyer was so protective of his work in this area
that when entomologist Evelyn Grosbeck Mitchell published a book titled
Mosquito Life in nineteen oh eight, Dyer wrote a scathing
review of it in the publication Canadian Entomologist, and in
that review he accused her of plagiarizing the work of
himself and other entomologists without credit. Mitchell had worked the

(11:40):
National Museum as an illustrator prior to writing her book,
and Dyer stated that quote. Probably Miss Mitchell scarcely realizes
herself how much information she has absorbed from the government bureaus.
We should like her to try to imagine what her
book would have been if she had written it before
she came to Washington. Mitchell filed a suit against Dier

(12:01):
for libel, seeking thirty five thousand dollars in damages. That
lawsuit was dismissed because it wasn't really pursued. After the
filing and reading it, it kind of sounds like she
was just filing it to make a point. But this
is just one example of a lot of fights that
Dier picked with fellow entomologists over the years. He and
Smith argued forever, to the point that Smith said he

(12:22):
would no longer go to the National Museum if Dyer
was involved.

Speaker 2 (12:27):
Coming up, we will talk about Dyer's work as an
editor and his complicated personal life, but first we will
take a quick sponsor break.

Speaker 1 (12:45):
Somehow, despite all of the many things keeping him busy,
including writing nasty reviews of anyone who dared to write
on a subject he worked in, Dyer found time to
write a book on his family history titled A Preliminary
Genealogy of the DIYer Family, was published in nineteen oh three.
He also became heavily involved in the publishing of entomological

(13:05):
journals during his career. In nineteen oh four he started
editing the journal of the New York Entomological Society and
he did that for three years. In nineteen oh nine
he became the editor of the Proceedings of the Entomological
Society of Washington, and then in nineteen thirteen he started
his own publication, in Secutor in Citier Menstruis that name

(13:27):
translates to Persecutor of Ignorance Monthly. Uh. He started this
one because he had a falling out with the Entomological
Society and he didn't want to edit their periodical anymore.
And I don't think they wanted him to either. And
that name is a dig at the organization and its members,
who he had bad relationships with.

Speaker 2 (13:49):
From the eighteen nineties to the nineteen teens, Harrison Dyer appeared,
at least outwardly to be a man who was living
an accomplished, well to do and overall conventional life, but
that had actually started to unravel at home, and in
nineteen fifteen, things shifted considerably, and to tell that story,

(14:09):
we've got to talk about a woman named Willeska Pollock.

Speaker 1 (14:13):
So. Wileska Pollack was born in eighteen seventy one into
a large family. Her mother, Louise, studied under German educator
and reformer Friedrich Froebel, who is credited with inventing kindergarten.
Willesca was deeply influenced by her mother's work in education,
and she joined her in it once she had finished
her own education as an educator, and Willsca also trained

(14:34):
new teachers in addition to running a kindergarten, specifically new
teachers from black communities. In nineteen hundred, Harrison, Zella and
the kids went to the Blue Ridge Mountains for a
summer trip. They stayed at a camp owned by George Pollock,
and that summer George's sister, Willesca was also staying at
the camp, so the dyers met Willesca. They socialized with her.

Speaker 2 (14:58):
As well as with other campers at the various group
activities that were available.

Speaker 1 (15:02):
There, and Harrison and Molesca hit it off. He taught
her about caterpillars and moths, and she started helping him
with collecting, and then when they were back in DC
and Willesca lived in Washington, DC. Also, he gave her
a job at the museum as a typist, helping him
compile his list of lepidoptera. So she taught kindergarten during

(15:24):
the day and then in the afternoon when school was over,
she headed to Harrison's office. They spent a lot of
time together, and he even named a species after her,
the Parasa. Wilesca.

Speaker 2 (15:34):
Trips like the one to the Blue Ridge were very
common for the Dire family, and after that trip, Willesca
sometimes popped up at them. In the summer of nineteen
oh one, they went to Colorado. Willesca arrived there late
in the summer, although there's some uncertainty about whether she
got there before Harrison left to go back to Washington,
d C. In nineteen oh six, the Dyers were in

(15:56):
southern California. This was also a trip for their daughter, Dorothy,
who had mastoiditis and was prescribed a mastoidectomy. Her skull
was drilled to relieve pressure. And then Wileska just happened
to run into Zella's mother, Dorothy, while the two of
them were both out on Errand's Wileska hung out with
the dyers after that. Fancy this, I'm also in Pasadena,

(16:18):
like ancertainly, how weird our travels keep intersected? How funny now.
That same year, nineteen oh six, Wileska got married to
a man named Wilfred p Allen. That wedding took place
in Richmond, Virginia, and Wilfrid just sort of pops into
the picture without any previous mention of him. Before that year,
Wileska told friends and family that she had met this

(16:40):
man on a train platform in Chicago and they had
started talking. And when she started talking to him about
the Bahai faith, of which she was a member, he
told her he was really interested in it. So she
got his address so that she could send him some
religious literature. And then, according to her story, their correspondence
quickly turned romantic and he prepared host Willsca and Wilfrid

(17:02):
had three sons together over the next seven years. Wilfred
was said to be living in Philadelphia for his job
as a railroad man and then as a private secretary
to a wealthy man named only mister McGrath. He never
made it to any of his son's births, although Willeska's
good friend Harrison Dyer, was there for all of them.

(17:23):
In fact, nobody ever saw Wilfrid, although Willeska, despite having
a rather modest living as a kindergarten teacher, was able
to purchase various properties with what she said were funds
that Wilfred sent to her. She also told friends that
doctor Dyer, who was very happy to see her starting
a family, had helped the couple out financially from the beginning.

Speaker 1 (17:46):
So Zella Dyer was not ignorant of this odd and
intense connection between her husband and Wileska, and she went
beyond suspicion to downright angry when she discovered that Harrison
had transferred the ownership of a lot of his Washington,
d c. Real estate, with the exception of the family home,
to Wileska's name. So Zella wrote Wileska letters asking her

(18:09):
point blank about the relationship with Harrison, but Wileska always
insisted the two of them were really more like siblings
than anything romantic. But despite these assurances, things got really
strained in the dire home, and eventually Zella went to Berkeley, California,
to be near her family, and she and the children
had an extended stay there. In nineteen fifteen, Harrison filed

(18:32):
for divorce from Zella, claiming cruelty and desertion. Harrison probably
wanted this whole thing to happen really quickly, but that
was not how it played out, and things got really ugly,
really fast. Zella filed a countersuit, saying that Dyer had
misrepresented his income and that he held far more real
estate than he had claimed, and that his Smithsonian income

(18:55):
was just a tiny sliver of what he was worth,
which he estimated to be more than six hundred thousand dollars,
so she wanted a much larger alimony than what Dyer
had suggested in his filing. But early on Harrison Dyer's
case was dismissed by District Judge T. C. Hart quote
on the ground of lack of jurisdiction, Dyer having failed

(19:17):
to establish to the satisfaction of the court that he
was a bonafide resident of Nevada. According to the Nevada
State Journal coverage of the case, yeah, uh for clarity,
because I didn't include it earlier. He had started to
get paid after a while by the US Department of
Agriculture because of his work in insects, and he claimed

(19:38):
that he made eighteen hundred dollars a year.

Speaker 2 (19:41):
And that that was his whole income, not which is
went paid by the Smithsota, but that was it, and
that was nowhere near what he was actually worth well.

Speaker 1 (19:49):
Lesca meanwhile had also filed for divorce from her husband, Wilfred.
She had also filed in Nevada, and she had actually
moved with her children to Reno prior to taking any
li eagal action. Nevada only required six months of residency
before filing for divorce. That was actually a law that
had been in play. It got extended to a year,

(20:09):
and then, like right around the time this started boiling up,
they had backed it up to only six months again.
But even so this proved difficult. She and Harrison almost
certainly wanted to make sure all documents that would hold
them back from being legally married themselves were taken care of,
but it was still very difficult for a woman to
get a divorce from her husband at this point. Right

(20:31):
there had to be a case made that she had
been mistreated in some way, and this was all made
even more complicated because Wilfrid Allen was a no show
and pretty quickly a judge sniffed out that there was
something weird going on. Additionally, Zella Dyer, in that filing
we've been talking about, had basically outed Wilfrid Allen as
a fictional character concocted by Harrison and Willsca so that

(20:53):
he could be married to both women at once.

Speaker 2 (20:56):
So, just to be super clear here, at this point,
Wileska is trying to get a divorce from a fictional.

Speaker 1 (21:01):
Care from her imaginary friends.

Speaker 2 (21:03):
Right on December fifth, nineteen fifteen, Willesca wrote Zella a letter,
and it's a doozy. She did not take any responsibility
for inserting herself into the dire family and committing adultery.
She instead chastises Zella for making it all public. She wrote, quote,

(21:24):
of course people are discussing it and enlarging on it
and writing to all their friends east, west, north and south,
so that even in Honolulu and Seattle and Europe they
have it all to talk about.

Speaker 1 (21:36):
Whose fault is it that all.

Speaker 2 (21:38):
This sensational news came to the view of the public,
never to be forgotten. Doctor and I were quietly in retirement.
It was your horrible, unnecessary, disgusting bill containing gross misstatements
all to the injury of the two other parties. In
this letter, Willesca goes on to assure missus Dyer that
the entire thing is going to disgrace her much as

(22:00):
her husband and Willesca herself. It's not clear why she
thinks Zella might be disgraced in all this, except maybe
through the shame of having her husband being a bigamist
for so many years. Yeah, there's another theory that we
could talk about in behind the scenes.

Speaker 1 (22:18):
That is a whole other bolo wax. The final paragraph
of this letter, written by Wileska, turns a little bit threatening.
It reads quote, A wise lawyer would have been so
mild in his charges that we might have let the
bill go by default, and so you would have gained
your object, but now only over our dead bodies. And

(22:38):
what an audience we will have if this suit comes off,
not only our friends and our friends' friends from far
and near, but all Washington, from the executive offices to
the saloons brought by your able advertising. I can see
them now crowding the courtroom to suffocation, struggling in the corridors,
and standing in long lines down the streets, guarded by

(22:59):
overtax policeman, do you think we shall let this audience
witness our defeat comedically? After this, she signs off with respectfully,
Willsca pe allen, this whole thing is wild. So Willska

(23:23):
appealed the initial court ruling. That ruling basically stated that
it seems like Wilfred was imaginary, that there was some
squirrely stuff going on with the Williska's status as a
resident of the state, that she seemed to be having
a long term adulterous affair, which would give her no
grounds to file for divorce. This imaginary husband would have

(23:43):
to be the one to do it right, because divorce
law at this point, like you had to show that
you had been wronged by your spouse to get out
of your marriage. And she could not do that, but
he maybe could if he filed something in the court
records of the Supreme Court of Nevada from December nineteen twenty.
So it did take a while. That is a court

(24:03):
that heard Willsca's appeal. It's noted quote while council appearing
as ameche Curier admit that plaintiff was a party to
a marriage ceremony on September fifth nineteen oh six, as
alleged in the complaint. It is contended one that there
is in fact no individual by the name of Wilfrid
p Allen, but that doctor Harrison, G. Dyer, or some

(24:23):
other person at the of the performing of the marriage
ceremony impersonated Wilfrid p Allen, and two that if there
is in fact a Wilfrid p Allen, the plaintiff is
not entitled to a divorce because of adulterous conduct on
her part long prior to the time when it is
claimed that he failed to support her.

Speaker 2 (24:42):
These court notes go on to really lay out the
ways that Willesca and Harrison had been sneaking around for years.
It notes that they took trips together, that Dyer, who
was normally fastidious in noting all of his lives doing
in his diaries, just did not mention in those notes
at all. It also mentions that his people started to

(25:02):
get really suspicious of Wileska's marriage. She and Dyer started
to create a pay portrayal to make the existence of
this Wilfrid Allen more believable. They opened a bank account
in his name. He was reported on the census the
Allan family built a new house in d C, but
the money actually came from Harrison Dyer. All these facts

(25:24):
were pretty obviously shady, but as they came up in court,
Willeska did a lot of work trying to provide reasons
for all these various inconsistencies. At one point during testimony,
she said that Wilfrid Allen was not her husband's real name,
but that he operated under an alias because he had
faked his death many years earlier and was basically hiding
from his family, which she thought explained both the difficulty

(25:48):
in finding anyone by that name and the fact that
none of her relatives had ever met this man.

Speaker 1 (25:54):
He keeps on the do because his parents thought he'd drowned.
Like that's literally the excus.

Speaker 2 (26:01):
In the judge's decision on this appeal of her divorce case.
He stated, quote, I cannot understand how anyone could listen
to the evidence of the plaintiff and watch her conduct
and demeanor upon the stand without being impressed by her
utter lack of sincerity. We are going to pause here
for a sponsor break, and then when we come back,
we're going to get into Dyer's life after the divorce.

(26:23):
And yes, finally the Tunnels.

Speaker 1 (26:35):
Dyer's professional reputation was unsurprisingly deeply damaged by the very
public coverage of all of these three way divorce proceedings
and bigamy, and all of the scandal of his double
life made his colleagues want to distance hit themselves from him.
Despite his proven entomological expertise. The Department of Agriculture actually

(26:56):
fired him for unbecoming conduct, and in December nineteen seven teen,
Dire donated forty four thousand specimens to the Smithsonian and
then at the end of that year he had what's
described as a nervous breakdown and he went to Connecticut
for two months to recover.

Speaker 2 (27:12):
It took years for all of the legal tangle of
Harrison and Willesca's divorces to be settled. The Dire divorce
was finalized at the end of nineteen twenty. Courts in
Nevada refused to spend any more time on the Allen divorce. Finally,
in nineteen twenty one, Harrison and Willesca got married. They
had been romantically involved for twenty years at that point,

(27:34):
with three kids, which Harrison then adopted because their birth
names were listed as Allen, and he had to do
so for them to take the last name of Dire.

Speaker 1 (27:45):
I feel like there's so much imaginary paperwork in this mix.
But still he was finally able to live openly with
the woman that he loved. He also became a member
of the Bahai Faith during this time, and he put
his editorial experience to work in that community by becoming
the editor of the periodical Reality. He used that magazine

(28:05):
as a personal platform and published a lot of his
own writing as a consequence. He's kind of My understanding
is that he's a controversial figure in the Bahai Faith
even today. He had always written fiction as well as
scientific papers, and some of those were included in Reality.

Speaker 2 (28:23):
But then in nineteen twenty four, Dyer once again found
himself in the news after another of his secrets came
to light. During some construction work in the DuPont Circle
area near the corner of twenty first in p Streets,
there was an accident on September fifteenth. A truck that
was making a delivery behind the house at fifteen twelve

(28:44):
twenty first Street Northwest just fell partially into the street.
The integrity of the street had not been compromised by
a sinkhole or the construction work that was happening around it,
but by a tunnel that had been dug underneath it.
This was not just a rudimentary tunnel, though, it had
multiple levels and electricity.

Speaker 1 (29:06):
So this caused a little bit of panic. Investigators and
the public started to immediately think of reasons why there
might be secret tunnels under the city. It could, some thought,
be an old spy tunnel, or maybe it was used
by bootleggers this was all happening right in the middle
of prohibition, or perhaps there was some other criminal or
terrorist group using the tunnels to move through the nation's

(29:28):
capital undetected. Journalist Larry Boardman decided to explore and document
these tunnels. He described seeing a tunnel with a dirt
floor when he entered with German newspapers from nineteen seventeen
and nineteen eighteen. Stuck to the ceiling, Boardman wrote, quote,
cryptic marks and symbols marked the pages, suggesting a code.

(29:49):
He also saw the electrical lights although the power was off,
and a pile of hundreds of broken glass bottles. He
noted that the main tunnel was tall and wide enough
for two adults to walk side by side in it,
but that as additional tunnels split off from it, sometimes
going down those tributaries were narrower. He followed one to

(30:10):
near the home of a former ambassador, and another that
almost reached the property of a publisher. Boardman quote followed
a third hallway to find it ending at the basement
of a house. The passageway had been cemented. Then a
second door also cemented, and yet another which led to
the basement. The house owner said he had never explored it.

(30:32):
This right up, though, ends with the revelation that these
tunnels were revealed to be the work of Harrison Dyer,
who Boardman described as quote a twinkling eyed, stoop shouldered
scientist with carefully trimmed beard and gray tinged hair. Boardman
ends though.

Speaker 2 (30:49):
By suggesting that somebody else may have been living in
these tunnels, no doubt, to feed the reader's imagination. When
Dyer gave a statement to the press about all of this,
it was pretty relaxed, he said, quote, I did it
for exercise. Digging tunnels after work is my hobby. There's
nothing really mysterious about it. I have been interested in
tunnels and underground construction work since I was a boy.

(31:12):
I constructed tunnels or caves whenever I could. Dyer said
that he worked on these tunnels from nineteen oh six
to nineteen fifteen. That address of fifteen twelve twenty first
Street northwest, behind which the truck had been when it
was delivering supplies and fell into the street, had been
his home, but he moved from there in nineteen fifteen.

(31:32):
He said that he was always careful to stay in
his property lines, and if this description of the tunnels
makes it sound like they extended past the lot of
one home, that is because they did. Dyer had bought
properties adjoining his own over the years to use his
lab space for growing insect larvae and to house live
in staff, but he didn't stop digging when he moved

(31:54):
in nineteen fifteen. He just stopped digging at twenty first Street.
He had moved to eight to four B Street and
had made an even more astonishing tunnel system there, reaching
thirty two feet into the earth.

Speaker 1 (32:07):
These tunnels were really impressive, and you can occasionally find
images like diagrams of them online and it's like a
little mind blowing. Dyer explained when questioned that the first
tunnel project he started was to set a garden for
his wife, Zella, and then the second one was dug
as a way to move furnace ashes out of his basement.
But in both cases he just kept digging, telling a

(32:29):
reporter quote, when I was down perhaps six or seven feet,
surrounded only by the damp, brown walls of mother Earth,
I was seized with an undeniable fancy to keep on going.
In this second setup, from the first tunnel of it
that was allegedly for ashes, and it was accessed near
the basement, there were two more levels down. There were

(32:50):
also vertical shafts on each end of the structure that
helped with airflow. There were two smaller vertical shafts interior
to the layout, and a vented opening to a young
The walls were bricked in many sections, and at least
one of the vertical shafts had a ladder built into it.
This tunnel system was carefully made enough that Dier was

(33:10):
comfortable letting his kids play in it. Please don't do this, No.

Speaker 2 (33:17):
Maybe the most surprising thing about Dyer's tunnels wasn't that
they were so meticulously crafted, or that they had electricity,
or that they were the work of one man. The
most surprising thing might be that they had been discovered
and covered in the papers seven years earlier. In May
of nineteen seventeen, the Washington Times had run the story

(33:38):
Mystery tunnel joins two homes. It explained that when the
tennis court over a section of the tunnel was excavated
for new construction, they had discovered this tunnel, and in
the same article, neighbors were like, yeah, those are the tunnels.
Harrison Dyer doug as a hobby, so this just wasn't
a secret. It had gotten kind of lost in the

(33:59):
news cycle. Yeah, it's very interesting that like the city
just completely forgot in the course of seven years, or
probably a lot of them never knew about it. This is,
of course happening in nineteen seventeen, so World War One
is happening, there's a lot going on, and also his
divorce is playing out. That's probably where people are associating
his name. But it's like, yeah, we knew about the tunnel,

(34:21):
so I don't know why there's a big deal. In
twenty four One of the rumors that has cropped up
over the years, and you'll find it over and over,
was that Dyer had dug these tunnels between his home
with Zella and Wileska Allen's house, and that's I mean,
I understand why people get there. It's a pretty reasonable
guess given the other links that Harrison and Wilesca were

(34:42):
willing to go to to maintain their relationship for so long.
But that is simply not the case in the case
of someone like Dyer, whose behaviors in all areas of
his life are kind of difficult to understand. His motivations
for tunneling may also just have to remain a little
bit of a mystery, or we just take it face
value that that's how he stayed fit and unwound. At

(35:03):
the end of the day, I'm like, dude, find another hobbies.

Speaker 1 (35:11):
As a homeowner.

Speaker 2 (35:12):
I'm just like, ah, what if my neighbor was tunneling
over underneath my house? Yeah? Same, even adjacent to my house.
Still not okay. Although he had rearranged his whole life
to live it the way he wished with Wilesca, his
finances faltered after the divorce. For one, legal fees and
the divorce settlement ate up a lot of his fortune.

(35:33):
For another, he started making bad business decisions. He just
didn't have the level of independent income that had enabled
him to just work for free in earlier years of
his life. Yeah, he bought like some luxury properties at
this stage that were like, oh, do you really want
to spend two million dollars right now, Let's just dig
tunnels under them and also make them structurally unsound. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:56):
He had been making his case to be rehired at
the USDA and various points over the years, and in
nineteen twenty eight he pursued the issue again after he
got worded that some of the leadership were kind of
considering that they might be willing to hire him back.
He may have been a curmudgeon and have all kinds
of foibles and personal drama, but he still was a
really good and pretty respected entomologist. But he never got

(36:19):
the job, not because they didn't hire him, but because
he had a stroke before anything moved forward and he
did not recover from it. He died on January twenty first,
nineteen twenty nine. Wilesca had his ashes buried with her family.

Speaker 2 (36:33):
Zella died in nineteen thirty eight after being struck by
a trailer in Long Beach, while Esca died in nineteen
forty from a heart ailment. Her obituary goes into depth
about her work with the Bahigh Faith, does not mention
any of this other scandal. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty it's

(36:54):
it's pretty nice. Literally, it's like Harrison Dyer's widow has died.
They don't talk about any of the weird stuff. It's
very lovely. I have so many notes for behind the
scenes because Harrison Dyer. But in the meantime I have
listener mail. All right, this is from our listener Carla,

(37:15):
who writes measurement in the UK and educator's perspective. Carla
opens with another comment on metric and imperial measures, as
you seem to be enjoying them. I am another UK
citizen who went to school in the seventies and eighties,
part of the generation that was supposed to spearhead the
country going completely metric like the listener from last week,
but even more metrically included. I don't do fahrenheit at all,

(37:38):
or pounds and ounces. I naturally think first in metric
for pretty much everything. The only exception is miles per
hour because of speed limits on the roads. There was
no imperial measurement used throughout my time at school. All
well and good, but here is the twist. After my
undergrad I trained as a maths teacher and found that
in the few years I was away, it had snuck

(38:00):
back in. So I had to essentially learn imperial in
my twenties in order to teach it in our national curriculum.
Is the statement quote understand and use approximate equivalences between
metric units and common imperial units such as inches, pounds,
and pints. Can you imagine how annoying it is having
to learn two separate systems and to convert units not

(38:22):
only within but between them. This was my all time
least favorite topic to teach. I feel like, especially when
you have students who are probably going I hate this,
it is not fun for the teacher either. They don't
want to force you to do that. I am firmly
in the camp of teaching slash learning masks for conceptual understanding,
never just information to be memorized. Praise you for this,

(38:43):
because I feel like that is the better way. Also
that we should be able to give a rational justification
for everything we ask the kids to do. Quite the
challenge in this case. And then she makes a request
for a possible topic, and she mentions in her ps

(39:06):
that she's a longtime listener, going forwards and also backwards
in time through the episodes nearly at the start, but
not a complete list as I wuz out of anything
too violent or grizzly. Thank you for your excellent podcast
and particularly keeping me company on insomnia nights, Carla, I
so appreciate this idea, one I can't imagine, and this
is evidence of my weakness. I can't imagine having to

(39:31):
learn a whole second set of units to a degree
that you have to master it to then teach other
people when you were in your twenties, doing training after
you have only known one.

Speaker 1 (39:43):
I know people do it. I don't think I could.
I struggle with it all the time. The best I
ever got at it was when for a while I
used to volunteer at the Georgia Aquarium and we would
do weights of the food diets. We would prep in kilograms,
and that's the best I ever got at it, because
we were still getting shipments of food in pounds, so

(40:05):
and even then it's dicey listen, but I can calculate
yards really quickly. So I love getting all these perspectives,
especially from the UK, and thinking about how the teaching
has had to shift and accommodate these weird backsteps that
are going on in some cases. If you would like
to write to us and tell us about your relationship

(40:25):
with metric or imperial units, or anything else for that matter,
you can do so at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
You can also find us on social media as Missed
in History, and if you haven't subscribed yet and you
would like to, you can do that on the iHeartRadio
app or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows.

Speaker 2 (40:47):
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Harrison G. Dyar, Jr., Entomologist and Tunneler