Workers In D.C. Uncovered A Strange Network Of Passageways. Then Its True Purpose Came To Light

The truck’s revealed a hole in the ground, but this isn’t just any hole. When people rush to look at what’s caused the vehicle to fall through the street, they’re stunned. The hole isn’t lined with soil, but with brick. Many bricks, and they form a tunnel, 8 feet high, capped with a line of bricks that have been glazed into shining ornaments.

Now, this happening caused quite a stir. The Pelham building’s proprietor was called over to the site, and he grabbed the janitor. The pair then descended into the void. They found themselves in a tunnel that was more than a yard across. The two of them walked along it for 60 feet, at which point they ran into an obstacle. There seemed to be a way down via a trapdoor, but they opted not to take it.

The apartment block owner and janitor weren’t the only people interested. As they explored, a crowd had begun to form. Before long, there was utter chaos as cars blocked the road and onlookers tried to get to the hole. People crammed into the alleyway in their hundreds, scrabbling at the earth in a quest to find out what lay hidden beneath.

Seeing the crowds, a few sharp businesspeople set up tours of the tunnel, some asking for as much as six bucks for a view. They claimed that it looked like a crypt from the Middle Ages. With all this pressure on the ground above the tunnel, concerns grew of a new cave-in, and cops had to come to keep people away from the access points.

Rumors spread about the tunnel’s provenance. The discovery of newspapers written in German led some to think that what had been uncovered was the undercover lair of secret agents. Other people thought it’d been a secret passage built during the Civil War or even as far back as the war of 1812, or perhaps some sort of hiding place.

Whatever it’d been, the tunnel was long. It ran for more than 100 feet. And it was 22 feet round, making it quite an impressive construction. It even contained electric lights. People spread word about the tunnel, and its size and complexity became exaggerated in the retelling. Its origin, though, remained mysterious.

One theory was particularly intriguing. People claimed that there’d been two homes nearby, each belonging to a brother. One of the siblings had had a stunning wife, while his brother had been unmarried. But she loved the bachelor, and he made the passage so that they could use it to meet.

Of course, these weren’t the only tunnels in Washington, though the subway hadn’t yet been built. There’s a whole network beneath Capitol Hill, for example, and it remains in use today by people who want to move easily from one government site to another. These were the same tunnels that allowed legislators to evade protestors in January 2021.

There are no fewer than 19 tunnels in the Capitol area alone, and some are big enough to drive a car along. The earliest were built back at the end of the 19th century, spidering out from the Capitol building, which itself was quite new, as it had to be reconstructed after the Brits had burned it down in 1812.

Tunnels linked the Capitol to the Russell Senate Office Building and Cannon Building. The latter had a system of electric vehicles that shuttled people between sites. So in fact Senators had their own subway, which they cruised in Studebakers, decades before the citizens of Washington would enjoy the Metro.

The Capitol tunnels aren’t simple constructions, though. The Cannon Tunnel’s like a high street, featuring a cobbler’s, financial buildings, and an eatery. Some of the tunnels that run from the James Madison Memorial Building house offices for the crew that maintains the Capitol complex. And if they get thirsty, they’re in luck: there’s a bodega in there, too.

Not satisfied with Studebakers, the Capitol employees eventually found themselves riding around on a monorail and then by light rail. There was soon a whole network, with lines spreading out to several government buildings. And there are yet more subterranean passageways in the area, including underneath the White House itself.

A tunnel made out of reinforced concrete goes between the East and West wings of the president’s home. It’d help the commander-in-chief get to safety in the event of nuclear attack. While it isn’t a shelter in itself, it does lead to one.

The place where the president will find safe haven’s called the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. It’s somewhere under the ground, but what it looks like and what it contains remain secret. We do know that the bunker can survive nuclear attack, though, so if such a thing ever does happen, senior government staff will be protected.

That isn’t the only thing you’ll find under the White House, either. There’s another tunnel, which can be accessed directly from the Oval Office. It goes down to the East Wing basement. When it was constructed, visitors to the Rose Garden had a sinking feeling. Yes, the surface of the garden began to slump! This tunnel’s supposed to allow the president to escape if the White House is invaded.

Other parts of Washington have tunnel complexes besides the Capitol. There’s one that runs for 700 feet beneath the streets of the city, linking the National History Museum and the Smithsonian Castle. It isn’t for anything sneaky, though. No, the passage is full of pipes that lead steam beneath the National Mall.

Also down underground, you’ll find the tomb of George Washington. But what you won’t find is any trace of Washington himself. Congress took three decades after he passed to figure out what they wanted to do about his remains. And when it finally asked his family for those remains, the answer was a firm no. Washington’s wishes to be interred alongside family had been honored instead.

But the tunnel found at 21st Street remained a mystery. Some of the locals felt that they had the answer, though. They pointed out that they’d known all about the underground works, having already seen them years before. The finger was pointed at the individual to whom the property had once belonged. He was Harrison G. Dyar, Jr.

Who was this Dyar? Well, it turns out that he was quite the character. The son of an inventor who’d specialized in telegraphy, he’d made a career in entomology, the study of insects. And if his public life was tumultuous, with plenty of conflict, then his private life was equally spicy.

The man made an enormous contribution to his area of expertise. Dyar catalogued thousands of moths and butterflies, and he gave names to thousands of species of insects, too. His work on mosquitoes and sawflies was also ahead of its time. In the end, his interest in bugs saw him able to donate more than 40,000 of them to the Smithsonian in 1917.

No doubt the reason Dyar had so many to give was that he’d breed and raise them. He studied their larvae to great effect. His work eventually led him to propose Dyar’s Law, which allows scientists to forecast how many stages (and of what type) an insect will have depending on the size of their head as a larva.

But this obsessive need to study insects — and collect them, even when on honeymoon — didn’t always make Dyar popular. He scribbled notes on scraps of paper, and when he wrote up his studies, he covered them in symbols that no one else could interpret. It didn’t help that he loved a fight, too.

One instance of Dyar’s combative nature came in a conflict with his workplace, the Smithsonian Institution. He was furious at the red tape involved with the organization, which meant that it was very slow to release his work. Because of that, he started his own publication. Dyar fought with colleagues as well, with one of them becoming so annoyed about his antics that they refused to have anything to do with the Smithsonian while Dyar was still part of it.

Dyar’s personal life had been eventful, too. He’d married a woman, Zella, who’d gained his attention by posting moths and butterflies to him. But it later became obvious that he was keen on someone else. This was Wellesca Pollock, a teacher whom he’d encountered while conducting research in the Appalachian Mountains.

In 1906 Wellesca claimed to be the wife of Wilfred P. Allen. There was only one problem: Allen didn’t seem to exist. So how had he had three kids with Wellesca? Zella was understandably suspicious, but Wellesca insisted that nothing was going on. This wasn’t quite true, though, as became clear when Wellesca tried to get a divorce.

The judge simply didn’t believe that Allen existed, so he refused the divorce! But Wellesca had been married, after all. Yes, she’d tied the knot with Dyar in 1906, meaning that he had two wives and two families. When the truth came out, it cost him his marriage to Zella and his job. He ended up lawfully marrying Wellesca a few years later.

Wellesca was a devotee of Bahá’í, a religious creed that aims to bring together religion and science. Dyar himself grew to be heavily involved in it, even editing a magazine all about the faith. But yet again, he found trouble. His views weren’t very popular among many Bahá’ís, though he kept the journal up until his dying day.

And this colorful figure was prime suspect for builder of the tunnel — but he remained quiet for a while. So as speculation continued to rage, Dyar kept the truth to himself. Then, finally, he confessed to the press. Yes, he’d built the passage between 1906 and 1916, before relocating to the West Coast.

But why had Dyar dug the tunnel? Well, it’d all started while he’d been doing some gardening on behalf of Zella. Dyar had been creating a bed for her flowers, he informed The Washington Star. He continued, “When I was down perhaps 6 or 7 feet, surrounded only by the damp brown walls of old Mother Earth, I was seized by an undeniable fancy to keep on going.”

And keep going Dyar did! He made a whole network of brick passageways, lit by electricity. On one of the arches, he carved a quotation from Latin poet Virgil, which read “Facilis descensus Averno.” This translates into “The descent into Hell is easy.” Perhaps he was acknowledging his own misdeeds.

Still, one mystery did linger. What on Earth compelled Dyar to keep digging for such a long time and in such an elaborate fashion? Well, he informed The Washington Post that it was all for fun. “Digging tunnels after work is my hobby,” he explained. “There’s nothing really mysterious about it.”

After all, Dyar noted, it wasn’t like the tunnels at 21st Street were secret or anything. One of his boys, Otis, treated them like a playground, as did other kids from the area. And people must have noticed him toiling away at them, carting earth out to tip into a derelict area in the neighborhood and hauling in bricks to create the tunnels.

Word got out about Dyar, and people speculated that the tunnels were a way from one of his families to the other. But they weren’t. Those homes were a couple of miles distant from each other. And he probably didn’t even use the passageways for secret trysts, since Otis and others could have entered at any time and found him with Wellesca.

What’s more, Dyar had built another tunnel system! He put together a fancy bunker at B Street SW, going down two dozen feet into the earth. Again, his underground passages were sufficiently high for an adult to stroll along them. There were shafts, too, with ladders fashioned from iron piping, which led into the depths.

In the end, the entomologist went so deep that he struck water. He’d actually reached the water table under the city. Again, the question of why Dyar bothered arose. In this instance, he’d begun his works to give himself a route from the basement of his home to the dumpster that avoided the open air. And once he’d done that, Dyar simply couldn’t stop.

It may seem a little bizarre to build your own tunnel network, but it appears that Dyar really didn’t have any sinister use for them. No human remains turned up! And he doesn’t seem to have been worshiping the devil down there or anything similar. There were no cached relics, either, and no sign of anyone else bar playing kids using the tunnels.

When Dyar passed away, the home on B Street was snapped up by the Department of Agriculture. It thought that the tunnels would be perfect for cultivating mushrooms. The idea was later mooted that they could be employed as shelters from air attacks in World War Two. Eventually, though, the whole network was destroyed when the FAA’s HQ was built.

The network at 21st Street was back in the news during 1958, when a way into them was unveiled. A man called Lewis Curd uncovered the entry during constructing work. Not wanting to miss the chance for a few moments in the limelight, Curd had his kids snapped in the tunnels, and their picture appeared in The Washington Post.

One of those children, Chip, told the same newspaper in 2012, “What I saw of it was well built. I’m probably the only one who remembers it.” The entrance was later sealed off with concrete, but Chip was sure that over time building work had made the tunnel system fall in, leaving only the memory of the tunneling bug-man behind.