Cardiff Giant

In October of 1869, the Cardiff Giant legend was born and has since gone down in history as one of America’s greatest hoaxes. The tale begins when the petrified remains of the 10-foot-tall man were discovered by Gideon Emmons and Henry Nichols while digging on a farm in Cardiff, New York.

The Giant was the brainchild of George Hull, a scam artist, and atheist. Atheism was a controversial and subversive belief in the 1800s.

The idea came to him after a debate he had with a preacher in Iowa about the preacher's literal interpretation of the bible, specifically, the preacher's belief in the passages referring to Nephilim, giants, in the Book of Genesis. “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also after that…” (Genesis 6:4).

The Giant was conceived in Fort Dodge, Iowa where the 12-foot long, 4-foot wide, and 2-foot thick block of gypsum was carved. Hull told inquiring locals a number of different stories as to what the stone was going to be used for. One of those stories included a commemorative Abraham Lincoln statue. The block of gypsum was then sent to Chicago to be carved into the shape of a man by Edward Burkhardt.

Finally, it was shipped to Cardiff, New York. There it was buried on William Newell’s farm, a relative of Hull. The whole process took between 1-2 years to complete and Hull spent close to $3,000 on it, which is equivalent to over $60,000 today.

Attempts were made to make it look as authentic as possible. Needles were used to create a skin pore texture, water and sand were rubbed across the statue to create water-worn damage, and the statue was doused in sulphuric acid to achieve a weathered appearance. 

Cardiff is near the "burned-over district" of Upstate New York that the Second Great Awakening sparked a couple of decades earlier. It was an area of immense religious fervor. Religious leaders claimed to have seen god in the area, including Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. In addition, ten years earlier, Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species,” which caused great conflict between religious and science-based ideologies. The Giant was presented to the public at a very strange time for religion and science, each side felt the Giant validated their ideology, contributing to its popularity.

The intended purpose of creating the Giant was for Hull to mock the religious beliefs and blind faith of the people around him, while simultaneously making money by charging admission to view the Giant.

After a year passed, Hull made contact with Newell that the time had come to “discover” the Giant. So Emmons and Nichols were hired to dig a well on the farm on the exact site where the Giant was buried. The Giant was only buried 3-feet down, so the men discovered the giant quickly. They initially assumed the Giant was connected with native tribes, such as the Onondaga people, who had history in that area and a legend about stone people.

Word spread quickly to neighboring towns and the Cardiff Giant became an attraction. Newell put a tent up over the Giant and began charging visitors admission to view it. Thousands of visitors flocked to Newell’s farm, nicknamed “Giantville”, in the first week.

The Giant attracted a variety of visitors, some wanted desperately to believe it was in fact a giant like the bible said, others were more skeptical but were open to the idea that it was a giant statue from an ancient time. The director of New York State Museum and paleontologist, Professor James Hall, declared it “the most remarkable object yet brought to light in this country”.

Cardiff locals grew suspicious after remembering Hull moving a large shipment through downtown the previous year. As news of the Giant spread across the country, Fort Dodge locals began remembering the time Hull had spent there cutting the stone under vague pretenses.

With the Giant’s rapid growing popularity, Hull and Newell sold the Giant to David Hunnum and his associates. Hunnum took it on tour around New York State, its first stop being Syracuse. With more eyes seeing it, more skepticism grew. Yale paleontologist, Othniel C. Marsh declared the Giant a fake and noted the visible chisel marks, indicating that it is a statue. Those marks should have worn away if it was truly buried for hundreds of years. Other people came forward suggesting that it had to be a newer statue because the gypsum would have deteriorated buried under the soggy soil for years.

As speculation about the authenticity of the Giant grew, Hull started admitting that the Giant was a hoax. Despite the Giant’s controversy, P.T. Barnum expressed interest in buying a share of the Giant. When the new owners refused his offer, he commissioned a replica and displayed it as his own. Hull would brag about how his Giant was the original fake and the phenomenon was created by him.

Barnum displayed his Giant in Manhattan and had to compete with the original when its tour stopped there. The competing Giants still attracted crowds because the public was intrigued by the hoax that fooled not only the general public, but also some of the greatest scientists of the time. The Giant was an important part of pop culture. It was the subject of Mark Twain's 1870 short story “A Ghost Story” and L. Frank Baum’s poem "The True Origin of the Cardiff Giant”.

Hunnum attempted to sue Barnum for copying his Giant and claiming it as the authentic one. Allegedly, the quote "There's a sucker born every minute" was derived from this case and is often attributed to P.T. Barnum. Others alleged Hunnum said it. There does not appear to be any proof of either man saying it, but the quote continues to live on.

The popularity of the Cardiff Giant would begin to fade as an expose was published with the stone workers confessing to carving the statue. The original Giant would leave New York and tour the rest of the Northeast through the early 1870s to diminishing audiences. Hull attempted to con the public in 1877 with another “discovered” giant, The Solid Muldoon. This time a clay one in Colorado. The statue tour was brief, the public wasn’t interested. He couldn’t fool them twice.

By the end of the 1800s, there were fake Giants and petrified men all over the country. It became a strange phenomenon. An interesting example is the petrified body of General Thomas Francis Meagher. Meagher was an Irish revolutionary and Union officer during the Civil War. He was the acting governor of the Montana Territory until he disappeared in the Missouri River in 1867. It was assumed he had drowned. His body was never recovered. Miraculously, thirty years later, in 1899, a gold prospector discovered petrified remains with a hole between the eyes, adding to its mythology that he was shot with a bullet or arrow. The gold prospector sold it to Arthur W. Miles, who took it on tour claiming it was the General who was murdered. After the Cardiff Giant and The Solid Muldoon hoaxes, the public was not going to humor yet another stone man and it faded into obscurity.

The original fake would be moved into storage for 40 years, then sold for failure to pay the storage fees. It would then pass under many owners and made appearances at fairs in Iowa and New York as a novelty attraction.

After years of being passed around, the Giant was purchased by the New York State Historical Association, presently known as the Fenimore Art Museum, in Cooperstown, NY. The New York State Historical Association put the Giant on display at The Farmers’ Museum on May 19, 1948, where it has been attracting visitors for over 75 years. 

Dr. James Smith was a renowned plastic surgeon, in addition to being an avid collector of antique penny arcade games, music machines, and other circus and carnival memorabilia. He amassed one of the largest coin-operated game collections in the world. In 1994, he put his entire collection up for auction at Sotheby's. The Smith Collection of Penny Arcade Machines and Related Memorabilia auction included over 700 lots. Among those lots was P.T. Barnum’s Cardiff Giant. 

Barnum’s Giant was purchased at the auction by Marvin Yagoda and is currently on display at Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum in Farmington Hills, MI.

A third copy of the Giant can be found at The Fort Museum and Frontier Village, back where the legend all began, in Fort Dodge, IA.

The Cardiff Giant serves as an interesting reminder of a time when beliefs in religion and science couldn’t be further apart, but both sides wanted badly to believe.

Written by Eliza Rinn