In the 19th century, the belief in giants and the fascination with bones and bodies came together to create a strange phenomenon: that of the petrified giant. The most famous and well-documented of these hoaxes occurred in 1869, when two workers digging a well near Cardiff, New York, discovered a giant stone man underground.
The find was dubbed the Cardiff Giant and would spark a craze for fossilized giants that would continue for the next forty years before finally dying out in the early 20th century.
Discovered in New York in 1869, the Cardiff Giant was a 10-foot-tall “petrified humanoid” that numerous Christians believed was proof of the existence of Biblical giants.
A huge discovery and an even bigger fraud
The strange story of the Cardiff Giant begins not in the distant past, but in 1866 with a man named George Hull. Hull, a cigar maker and staunch atheist, was in Iowa on business when he crossed paths with a Methodist revivalist, Reverend Turk.
Hull and the right reverend exchanged heated words. The preacher mentioned the text from Genesis that refers to the antediluvian giants, which sparked an idea in Hull’s mind.
To implement his strange plan, Hull returned to Iowa in 1868 to find a suitable stone for his purposes. Once secured, he hired men to dig out the ten-foot-long block of plaster, telling them that a monument to Abraham Lincoln was planned to be built in New York. He then had the gigantic block shipped to Chicago, where it was fashioned by a German stonemason sworn to secrecy.
The completed giant, which measured approximately 10 feet tall and weighed 3,000 pounds, was shipped by rail to Cardiff, New York, in November 1868, where Hull and his cousin and co-conspirator William Newell buried the voluminous sculpture.
A year later, Newell hired Gideon Emmons and Henry Nichols to dig a well on his property. On October 16, 1869, the workers encountered stone under a meter of ground. A man reportedly exclaimed after cleaning up trash and seeing a large stone base: “I declare an old Indian is buried here!”
What followed after the excavation of the statue could be described as ‘giant fever’. When the news broke, people flocked from miles around to see the sight. Hull and Newell set up a tent over the statue and charged $0.25 per head to view it. As the crowds grew and Hull saw that he could get even more money from the eager tourists, he doubled the entrance fee.
The giant electrified the audience. Many believed they had seen a petrified giant straight from the scriptures. A Syracuse preacher stated that, and since when were the clergy wrong about anything?
Other experts disagreed. Some believed it was a statue built by missionaries to impress local Indian tribes, while others thought it might have been a statue made by some kind of ancient people that predated the arrival of the white man, and perhaps also by the Indians themselves.
Andrew White, the first president of Cornell University, visited the site to cast his skeptical eye on the sensational find. Even the skeptic was impressed by its theatrical appearance: a gigantic creature lay in its grave, illuminated only by the soft light of candles, while silent spectators stood in silent awe at its size and age. On closer inspection, of course, White discovered that the figure was a cut-out statue, and not a particularly good one at that.
Seeing White’s skeptical reporting, combined with the fact that Newell himself had let the cat out of the bag, made Hull nervous. . He sold the giant to David Hannum and a syndicate of businessmen interested in the spectacle for as much as $23,000. The businessmen took the giant’s show with them on their way to New York City.
Meanwhile, PT Barnum heard about the row surrounding the giant. The legendary showman offered Hannum and his cabal $50,000, as he did for the statue. When Hannum refused, Barnum simply sent a man to watch the Cardiff Giant.
The agent molded a piece of wax into the giant’s likeness, and Barnum paid to have his own version of the giant carved. When Hannum heard that Barnum’s giant was drawing a crowd, he uttered famous words often attributed to P. T. Barnum himself: “A sucker is born every minute.”
The gigantic mania ends
The Cardiff Giant wasn’t the only so-called petrified man found in mid-to-late 19th century America. The land seemed to teem with the stone-encased bodies of the ancient dead.
Hull himself made another hoax body, this time the Solid Muldoon, with an ape-like tail no less. Hotels in New York built their own giants and used the stone bodies to attract crowds of curious people.
The Cardiff Giant, in turn, fell on hard times. Hannum took Barnum to court over the copying, where a judge told the hoaxer he could get his order if the giant came and swore on his own authenticity.
Needless to say, the skeptical judge dismissed the case. Meanwhile, Yale paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh denounced the giant as a fraud and wrote that the statue was likely of recent origin. George Hull finally confessed to the hoax on December 10.
The image that spawned dozens of imitations was exposed as a fake. Still, over time the giant and its many imitations still brought in money for sideshows and con artists, though returns never matched those of the early giant craze.
In 1901, the statue appeared at the 1901 Pan American Exposition in Buffalo. Few paid any attention to it, its moment of glory having passed for forty years or more. A publisher from Des Moines, Iowa purchased the Cardiff Giant. He sold it in 1947 to the Farmer’s Museum in Cooperstown, New York, where it is currently on display.
Sources: “The Cardiff Giant.” Boerenmuseum.org. The Peasant Museum. January 1, 2015. http://www.farmersmuseum.org/node/2482; Rose, Mark. “When Giants Roamed the Earth.” Archaeology. Volume 58, Number 6. November/December 2005. Retrieved from: http://archive.archaeology.org/0511/etc/giants.html
