Upstate New York Was Once Inhabited by Giants
In 1869, excitement swept through the religiously devout, as word spread that evidence supporting the Biblical assertion that giants had once roamed the earth, had been unearthed in Upstate New York. It began on October 16th, 1869, when laborers digging a well for William Newell, in Cardiff, NY, struck stone. Further digging revealed a huge foot. With mounting excitement, they continued excavating, and to their amazement, they ended up unearthing the petrified remains of a 10-foot tall man.
Hundreds of archaeologists and scientists, and thousands of the curious, flocked to Newell’s farm, where he charged 50 cents for a look. Newell made no claims about the giant’s authenticity, but invited onlookers to make their own conclusions. Observant people saw it as a crude statue, but to the religious, it was proof of Genesis 6:4, which stated that the world had once been inhabited by giants.
In reality, observant skeptics were right, and the unearthed giant was just a statue. It was a prank on the religiously credulous, that stemmed from a heated debate at a revival meeting regarding the Biblical claim about giants. George Hull, an atheist who had participated in that debate, decided to see just how gullible his religious interlocutors could be.
So he bought a big block of gypsum in Iowa and shipped it to Chicago. There, he swore a stonecutter to secrecy and had him carve the stone into the shape of a man. To give the result an aged look, chemicals were used, and the statue’s surface was pitted and punctured with needles to make it seem more weathered. Hull then shipped it to the farm of his cousin, William Newell, who buried it behind his barn in 1868. A year later, Newell hired workers to dig a well behind the barn, where they came across the statue.
Archaeologists, scientists, and other scholars who saw what came to be known as the “Cardiff Giant“, were nearly unanimous in declaring it a fraud. Their voices were drowned, however, by the thundering of theologians and preachers, who passionately defended the prank’s authenticity. While that debate raged on, crowds of the curious and faithful kept coming in ever greater numbers to see for themselves. Hull, who had spent about $50,000 in 2017 dollars on the prank, sold his share to a syndicate for about half a million in today’s money. The statue was then moved to Syracuse, where it drew ever-larger crowds.
Huckster PT Barnum offered the syndicate the equivalent of a million dollars for the Giant. The owners refused to sell, so Barnum had a plaster copy made, and exhibited it in New York City. He declared it to be the authentic Cardiff Giant, and that the one in Syracuse was a fake. His brazenness worked, giving rise to the phrase, coined for those paying to see Barnum’s copy, that “there’s a sucker born every minute“. Lawsuits about authenticity followed, and in the subsequent litigation, Hull finally confessed to the prank. The court declared both Giants fakes, and ruled that Barnum could not be sued for calling a fake giant a fake.