19th Century Hoax Now Just an Interesting Relic

After half a century of staring at museum visitors in upstate New York and trying to fool them, the Cardiff Giant may be getting ready for a road trip.

“Maybe it should be a historic tour to places where he has been before, like Iowa, his home state,” said Gilbert Vincent, director of the Farmers Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y. “We’d need some financial backing, but it’s certainly feasible.”

The Giant, one of the world’s great practical jokes, is a 10-foot, 2,990-pound statue, carved out of Fort Dodge gypsum and made to look ancient.

His “discovery” was a phenomenon in 1868.

“A New Wonder!” the headlines said. “The Petrified Giant!”

Learned men rushed to put meaning to the bogus behemoth, and the stone man was even more famous when he was pronounced a fake.

“He certainly shows the human character, whether it be humor or gullibility,” Vincent said.

The idea for the hoax came to George Hull, a cigar maker from Binghamton, N.Y., on a visit to his sister in Iowa in 1866. One evening, he argued with “a Reverend Mr. Turk,” who insisted on a literal translation of the Biblical phrase, “There were giants in the Earth in those days.”

Hull decided to prey on the literalists--and to make some money in the process. Two years later, he bought an acre of land in the gypsum fields of Fort Dodge and hired quarry men to carve out a five-ton chunk.

The great weight broke a number of wagons and bridges in the 40 miles to a railhead, and Hull had to cut down the stone to reduce its weight. On Aug. 4 of that year, the slab arrived at the shop of Edward Burhkardt in Chicago.

The carving was done in secret.

“Slightly inclined to the right, with one foot drawn up, the right hand resting on the abdomen and the other pressed against the back, the Giant appeared as though he had died in agony,” the museum account said.

Great attention was paid to eliminating chisel marks and to “aging” the Giant by discoloring the stone with sulfuric acid.

When Hull was satisfied that it could pass as a fossil or a statue, the Giant was carted to the farm of William “Stub” Newell, a distant relative, near Cardiff, N.Y., which is near Syracuse.

In November 1868, the stone was buried near Newell’s barn, and the ground was seeded to clover.

Nearly a year later, Newell staged the discovery. Two men hired to dig a well were directed to exactly the right spot and left to make their great find.

It was a sensation.

A stream of gawkers clamored to Newell’s place, of course paying a slight admission charge to compensate the farmer for his expenses.

One preacher declared, “This is not a thing contrived of man but is the face of one who lived on the Earth, the very image and child of God.”

Hull must have laughed--the face was a likeness to his.

Within weeks, the Giant was declared a fraud and Hull confessed.

But the stampede continued. Some were unconvinced by the confession. Others just wanted to see the object of all the commotion. The railroad created a special stop for all the Giant visitors.

Hull wasn’t the only one to make money on the hoax. Circus man Phineas T. Barnum made an exact copy and displayed it as “The Original of all ‘Cardiff’ Giants” in New York.

It must have been an amusing courtroom scene when owners of the real fake tried, and failed, to get an injunction to prevent display of the look-alike.

After all the touring, crowds diminished, and the Giant went in storage for decades. He changed hands often, finally ending up in the home of Des Moines publisher Gardner Cowles Jr. In 1947, Cowles sold the stone man to Vincent’s museum, where he has remained ever since.

Vincent said the Giant wouldn’t fool very many today because of modern tests for authenticity. But humans are still gullible, he said, and many like to be fooled.

The Louisville Courier Journal in Kentucky put it nicely 50 years ago:

“It probably would not be true that you can fool all of the people some of the time if they didn’t want it that way. There is a craving for marvels, the tall tale, the haunted house, the whodunit, the two-headed calf.”

Or an ancient stone man.

No definite plans have been made for a tour, which Vincent said would cost perhaps $100,000.