Well diggers near Cardiff strike a ten-foot stone giant
A Methodist revival argument over giants in Genesis had been simmering for nearly a year before the dig. On October 16, 1869, laborers Gideon Emmons and Henry Nichols, digging a well for farmer William "Stub" Newell near Cardiff, New York, struck something hard just a few feet underground. What came up was a 10-foot, 3,000-pound stone figure, which Newell presented as a petrified ancient giant. Newell began charging fifty cents a head to see it the next day.
The Cardiff Giant became shorthand for American credulity and American showmanship in the same breath, while Yale scientist Othniel Marsh called it a fake and P. T. Barnum built his own copy to cash in anyway. David Hannum's line about suckers born every minute, misattributed to Barnum ever since, is still quoted today, long after most people have forgotten the hoax it came from.
QWho actually carved the Cardiff Giant, and where did the work happen?
The carving was outsourced through a chain of hired specialists far from New York. George Hull shipped his quarried gypsum block to Edward Burkhardt, a German stonecutter in Chicago, who in turn brought in sculptors Henry Salle and Fred Mohrmann to do the actual carving. The block itself started out at Fort Dodge, Iowa, where quarrymen cut a slab measuring 10 feet 4.5 inches long before it ever reached Chicago. Hull never touched a chisel to the stone himself. He designed the operation and modeled the figure's proportions on his own body, but the physical sculpting was entirely the work of men he never mentioned publicly during the hoax's run. Their names surfaced only after Hull's confession unraveled the whole production.
QWhat happened to P. T. Barnum's rival copy of the giant after the hoax collapsed?
Barnum's unauthorized plaster copy did not vanish once the court declared both giants fakes on February 2, 1870. It survived the scandal and still exists today, on display at Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum in Farmington Hills, Michigan, far from the Cooperstown museum that holds Hull's original. Additional replicas also outlived the controversy: one sits at The Fort Museum and Frontier Village in Fort Dodge, Iowa, near where the original gypsum was quarried, and another is housed at the Fenimore Farm & Country Village, just a few miles from the real giant in Cooperstown. The hoax produced at least four separate physical giants, now scattered across two states.
QHow much weight did the giant lose between being quarried and finished, and how long was it exactly?
The finished Cardiff Giant weighed 2,990 pounds, roughly ten pounds shy of the three thousand figure most retellings round it to. Its length ran 10 feet 4.5 inches, matching the exact dimensions of the raw gypsum slab Hull's quarrymen cut in Fort Dodge, Iowa, meaning the sculptors shaped a human figure out of nearly the entire block without trimming its overall length. The near-exact match between the slab's length and the finished figure's length is a detail of record, though no source says Hull planned it that way. Every inch and pound was accounted for, down to the ten pounds separating the giant from an even three thousand.
