There Were Giants in the Earth in Those Days

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My first brush with the artifacts of history came when I was a youngster on a family vacation to Cooperstown, New York. I found the famous Hall of Fame, with its baggy uniforms, battered bats and flattened fielders’ mitts, decidedly ho-hum. I couldn’t wait to get to the nearby Farmers’ Museum and see something that I had heard of with wonder: the Cardiff Giant.

Although I understood that this item was at the heart of one of the great hoaxes in American history, it was not entirely clear to me what a hoax was. The object I saw, lying in a kind of grave, was a beguiling amalgam of historical fact and fairy-tale fantasy. It may have been phony, but there it was, a massive, indisputable giant. Later I learned the true story.

In October 1869, two laborers were digging a well near the barn on William “Stub” Newell’s farm in Cardiff, New York, when they hit a rock. “I declare, some old Indian has been buried here!” one of the men said. They had found, three feet below the surface, the stone image of a man more than ten feet in height. Newell figured folks would want to see the specimen so he set up a tent and began charging a quarter a look—the arrival of eager crowds prompted him to raise the fee to half a buck.

Newell soon sold the astounding attraction to some Syracuse businessmen led by banker David Hannum for $37,500—more than $800,000 in today’s currency. Hannum hauled the giant a dozen miles north to Syracuse, where it generated revenue at a fantastic clip. The creature’s foot was 21 inches long, and he weighed nearly a ton and a half—who could resist?

The giant’s discovery stimulated heated controversy at a time when competing accounts of the Earth’s natural history were vying with each other—one the standard Biblical saga of miracles and floods, the other a naturalistic story anchored in Charles Darwin’s 1859 book, On the Origin of the Species.

Some held the giant to be a petrified, oversized human; others said he was a statue carved by ancients. “The most remarkable object yet brought to light,” said one paleontologist. “A most decided humbug,” said another.

Before long, the great showman of the age, P.T. Barnum, arrived on the scene. He offered $60,000 to display the petrified creature in his New York museum for three months. Hannum, who planned to put the giant on view there himself, refused. Barnum beat him to it by commissioning a plaster copy. He claimed that upstate exhibit was a fake.

Hannum scoffed at those taken in by Barnum’s replica. “There's a sucker born every minute,” he said, a comment later attributed to Barnum himself. Hannum sued the New York impresario for fraud. Before the law had a chance to decide, a cigar maker named George Hull intervened with what he said was the actual story of the stony monster.

Hull had been traveling in Iowa when he had gotten into an argument with a Reverend Turk, a revivalist minister, about whether the Biblical reference to “giants in the earth” should be taken literally. The dispute gave him the idea of creating just such a giant. He had a big chunk of Iowa gypsum cut out and shipped to Chicago. There he paid a stonecutter to carve the colossus and to create a patina with various stains and abrasives. The total cost was $2,600.

Hull shipped the giant secretly by train and wagon to the farm owned by his cousin, Newell. The men buried the effigy and waited a year before the farmer hired the workmen to dig the well. With Hull’s revelation, the distinction between real and fake fell apart. So did Hannum’s case against Barnum.

Petrified men turned up here and there throughout the later decades of the nineteenth century. The Cardiff behemoth made an appearance at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, but by then the novelty had worn off. In 1947, the effigy was sold to the Farmers’ Museum, where it remains on display today.

During the giant’s heyday, Andrew White, the president of Cornell University, noticed the “great solemnity” observed by the credulous visitors to the display. “There was evidently a joy in believing in the marvel.” White hit on a reason for the enduring popularity of hoaxes of all kinds—from the fantastic frauds of Barnum to the wacko claims that clog social media to this day.

Reality often has a mundane quality. The human imagination, on the other hand, given half a chance, is prone to romp. Who doesn’t yearn for the joy of believing? Who doesn’t want to dream that there were once giants in the earth?