June 15, 2022 – Theme Week Day 3

We’re smack dab in the middle of our Weird Roadside Attractions: New York Edition theme week! Cooperstown is obviously best known for being home to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. But there’s another museum in the town, the Farmer’s Museum, where you can see America’s greatest hoax, the Cardiff Giant.
The Cardiff Giant was the idea of a cigar maker named George Hull. He was very attracted to science, especially Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. He was also an atheist and skeptic. During a business trip to Iowa, he found himself in the middle of argument with a revivalist preacher, particularly about a passage in the book of Genesis that said giants once lived on earth. He lost the argument, but it sparked an idea. Angered by his defeat and how gullible people could be, he decided he wanted to prove how easily he could fool people…with a fake giant.
Hull really played the long game to pull off this hoax. It took him 2 years of planning and around $3,000 to do it. The first thing he did was to secure a 10-foot slab of gypsum from Fort Dodge, Iowa. He shipped it to Chicago, where a stonecutter got to work sculpting it, using Hull as the model. They applied various stains and acids to make the giant look more authentically old and weathered. Then, he sent the completed masterpiece to his cousin’s farm in Cardiff, NY (which is south of Syracuse). There, it was buried near a barn on the property. A year later, his cousin hired a pair of unsuspecting workers to dig a well on his farm. They discovered the giant in October 1869.
It didn’t take long for word of the discovery to spread throughout the town. Hull charged 50 cents a person to view the giant, and 2,500 people came during the first week alone. He eventually sold his share to a group of businessmen for $23,000 – that’s $493,000 today! It continued to attract so many crowds that P.T. Barnum offered to buy the giant for $50,000. His offer was turned down, so Barnum had a sculptor make an exact replica, which he displayed in New York City as the real thing.
Hull confessed to the hoax in December 1869, and the next year both giants were revealed as fakes in court. It continued to be displayed, but by 1880 was condemned to storage in a barn in Massachusetts. It passed through several owners before finally being sold to the Farmers Museum in 1947, where it remains today.
As for Hull, he tried to continue his newfound career as a conman. He devised another hoax in 1877, this time building a 7-foot tall giant with a tail which he buried in Colorado. The lie was quickly exposed, and Hull wound up losing a good amount of money. He died in obscurity in 1902, but was still supposedly very proud of once fooling the world with his Cardiff Giant. Learn more here.