The Cardiff Giant

In 1869 workers digging a well on a farm at Cardiff unearthed a ten-foot “petrified man,” and the country lost its head: thousands paid to see the stone giant before it came out that a tobacconist named George Hull had carved it from a block of gypsum and buried it to prank his Bible-literalist kin. When P.T. Barnum could not buy it he built a copy and called THAT the real one, giving us the line about a sucker born every minute. The original still lies on its back at the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown.