The Cardiff Giant

TRUE: a documented 1869 hoax, one of the greatest in American history

On 16 October 1869 two men hired to dig a well behind William "Stub" Newell's barn in the hamlet of Cardiff, New York, hit stone three feet down. They cleared the soil, saw the shape of a foot, and one of them said, "I declare, some old Indian has been buried here!" What they uncovered was a stone man more than ten feet long, his limbs twisted as if in a death struggle.

Within days the roads were jammed with buggies, carriages, omnibuses from the city and farm wagons. Newell put up a tent and charged 25 cents a look, then 50. Cardiff's hotels and restaurants had never seen such trade. Under the dim light of the tent, Andrew D. White, the first president of Cornell, found visitors barely speaking above a whisper, and heard a Syracuse minister wonder how anyone could doubt it was a fossilised human being, perhaps one of the giants of Scripture. White himself was sure it was a hoax: there was no reason to dig a well on that spot, with a good spring already running to the house and barn. The Yale palaeontologist Othniel C. Marsh pointed out that the figure was soluble gypsum still showing fresh tool marks, and called it "a most decided humbug."

It was the work of George Hull, a cigar maker and Newell's cousin. Hull, a sceptic, had lost an argument at a Methodist revival over Genesis 6:4, which says there were giants in the earth in those days, and set out to show how easily people could be fooled. In 1868 he had a block of gypsum quarried at Fort Dodge, Iowa, claiming it was for a monument to Abraham Lincoln, and had it carved in Chicago in his own likeness behind quilts hung to muffle the noise. He beat its surface with needles to fake pores, stained it with acid, and buried it on Newell's farm that November, about $2,600 into the scheme.

Hull sold his interest for $23,000 to a syndicate led by David Hannum, which moved the giant to Syracuse. P. T. Barnum offered $50,000, was turned down, and simply had a plaster copy made and exhibited it as the real thing. Hannum, watching crowds pay to see the copy, is quoted as saying, "There's a sucker born every minute"; the line has been pinned on Barnum ever since. Hull confessed in December 1869.

Fenimore Farm in Cooperstown bought the original in 1947, and it is still on display in the main barn of what is now the Farmers' Museum, billed as America's greatest hoax.