The discovery made on Stub Newell’s farm on Saturday, October 16, 1869, seemed perfectly reasonable to the local residents of Cardiff, New York. These people were, after all, believers in a Judeo-Christian religious tradition that recognized the existence of giant human beings in antiquity. Genesis 6:4 told them that “there were giants in the earth in those days,” and lying at the bottom of a three-foot-deep excavation pit was a more than ten-foot-tall, recumbent giant man whose flesh had turned to stone, petrified, or so it seemed, in a manner similar to that which occurs to wood.
The story told was simple enough: digging through the alluvial soil on the floodplain of Onondaga Creek, the workers Newell had hired to excavate a new well on his property had unexpectedly encountered a massive, hard obstruction in the pit. Expanding their excavation, they uncovered not merely an inconvenient boulder, but what appeared to be the preserved body of a giant, naked man made of stone.
Perhaps the offers made by his neighbors to purchase the giant led Newell to recognize the potential value of this curiosity on his farm. Within just a couple of days of revealing the giant, he raised a circus tent over the specimen, hired a carnival barker to serve as a docent, and began charging twenty-five cents a head for people to view the giant who was advertised as being older than Noah’s flood.
People came in droves to examine what became known as “the Goliath of Cardiff” or just “the Cardiff Giant.” It was estimated at the time that Newell made more than $7,000 in a mere three weeks by exhibiting the giant. Local businesses, especially hotels and restaurants in nearby Syracuse, New York, began reaping enormous financial benefits as well. As a result, a consortium of businessmen purchased from Newell a three-quarter interest in the giant for $37,000 (in modern currency the equivalent of about $750,000). With attendant pomp, circumstance, and free publicity, they removed the giant from the isolated location of the Newell farm and brought it to Syracuse where it was more readily accessible to the hordes of people eager to pay for the opportunity to view it.
Scientists who investigated the giant immediately and almost unanimously diagnosed it as a fake, a crude carving of recent origin made to look like a petrified man. For example, upon examining it, world-famous Yale paleontologist O. C. Marsh declared it a humbug. J. F. Boynton, a geologist at the University of Pennsylvania, identified the stone that constituted the giant as being gypsum, a soft, sedimentary material quite unlike petrified wood, and stated categorically that the amount of erosion he saw proved that it could not have been in the ground for much more than a year (“The Lafayette Wonder,” Syracuse Daily Journal, October 20, 1869).
The story of the “Cardiff Giant” began in 1869 when Stub Newell allegedly unearthed the remains of a prehistoric human of giant-sized proportions. Newell set up an exhibit and attracted thousands of ticket-buying gawkers before the whole enterprise was exposed as an elaborate hoax. The notorious fake is still on display in Cooperstown, New York. (Kean Collection/Getty Images)
These scientific pronouncements did little, however, to deter people from paying to view the giant, but the confession of a previously shadowy character that the whole thing had been a hoax altered circumstances tremendously. George Hull, a relative of Stub Newell, was a cigar manufacturer in Binghamton, New York. He also was an inveterate atheist and prankster. After a conversation with a minister in Iowa, Hull decided that there was money to be made from gullible believers in the literal truth of the Bible. He purchased a large block of gypsum in Fort Dodge, Iowa, and shipped it to Chicago, where he hired two sculptors to carve a giant, naked man. Upon its completion, Hull had the giant humbug shipped to Syracuse and then brought it to the Newell farm by horse-drawn wagon. The giant was planted on the farm and allowed to lie there for, just as Boynton had suggested, about a year before Hull gave Newell the signal to hire the workers to dig a well. The rest is ignoble history.
The Kensington Runestone
Discovered in 1898 by a Minnesota farmer of Scandinavian ancestry, the Kensington Runestone quickly was declared a hoax by experts and spent the next few years in a shed. A greywacke slab apparently inscribed with medieval Scandinavian runic script, the Kensington Runestone was deemed authentic by a local expert a few years later, and the controversy has continued to rage ever since. Although most scholars consider the stone a modern forgery, there are those who date it according to its inscription of 1362, believing it a relic of a Viking expedition to the Upper Great Lakes from the known Norse settlements of Vinland (Newfoundland). The most notable scholar to argue in favor of the stone’s validity is Robert A. Hall Jr., professor emeritus of Cornell University. The stone now resides in its own museum near the site of its discovery, conveniently located in Scandinavian America’s Minnesota heartland.
C. Fee
Circus impresario P. T. Barnum was rebuffed in his initial effort to obtain the giant for his museum and, in typical Barnum fashion, made his own version—a fake of what was already a fake—and presented it to the public as the “real” Cardiff Giant. Mark Twain was so amused that he wrote a short story (“A Ghost Story”) about the agony experienced by the ghost of the Cardiff Giant upon encountering Barnum’s copy of his “body.”
The giant himself had a checkered history following Hull’s confession, being trotted out at agricultural fairs and even being purchased by an Iowa newspaper publisher who kept it in his basement as a conversation piece. One can only imagine the conversations it must have inspired. Ultimately, the giant was returned to the scene of the crime—well, nearby, anyway. It currently resides at the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, New York, where it continues to astonish the viewing public.
Kenneth Feder
See also Jackalope; Legend Tripping; Twain, Mark
Further Reading
Feder, Kenneth L. 2014. Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology. New York. McGraw-Hill.
Franco, Barbara. 1990. The Cardiff Giant: A Hundred Year Old Hoax. Cooperstown, NY: New York State Historical Association.
Tribble, Scott. 2009. A Colossal Hoax: The Giant from Cardiff That Fooled America. New York. Rowman and Littlefield.
Twain, Mark. 1869. “The Lafayette Wonder.” Syracuse Daily Journal, October 20.
Twain, Mark. 1875. “A Ghost Story.” In Sketches New and Old. Hartford, CT: American.