The Cardiff Giant Hoax
Near Cooperstown, New York
Just north of the village, the Farmers' Museum recreates rural New York life of the eighteen hundreds, with a working farmstead and a village of historic buildings moved here from around the region. But its most famous resident is a fraud: the Cardiff Giant, once called the greatest hoax in American history. In eighteen sixty-nine a ten-foot-tall stone figure was dug up on a farm in Cardiff, New York, and crowds paid fifty cents each to gawk at what many believed was a petrified ancient giant.
In truth it was the scheme of a New York tobacconist named George Hull. An outspoken skeptic, Hull had argued with a preacher about a Bible passage describing giants who once walked the earth, and he decided to prove how easily people could be fooled. He had a block of gypsum quarried in Iowa, secretly carved into a giant in Chicago, and buried on his relative's farm to be discovered later.
The famous showman Phineas Taylor Barnum even tried to buy it, and when he was refused, he built his own copy. Before long a Yale scientist spotted fresh chisel marks that gave the whole thing away, and Hull confessed. Today the Cardiff Giant lies here in Cooperstown, a monument to American gullibility and the enduring appeal of a good tall tale.
