The Cardiff Giant

Summary

A ten-foot stone man dug up on a farm near Cardiff, New York, on 16 October 1869 drew paying crowds as a petrified giant. It was a gypsum statue, carved in Chicago in 1868 for George Hull of Binghamton and buried on the farm to be found.

The first experts to examine it said it was a statue, not a fossil. What they got wrong was its age. The Yale palaeontologist O. C. Marsh settled that in November 1869: the tool marks were still distinct, on a stone that dissolves in water.

What is documented

The find. A pamphlet printed in 1869 to promote the exhibition, The American Goliah, tells the story as the finders told it. On "Saturday forenoon, Oct. 16th, 1869", William C. Newell, a farmer near Cardiff in the town of Lafayette, Onondaga County, set two workmen, Gideon Emmons and Henry Nichols, to dig a well near his barn. About three feet down they struck a stone figure lying on its back. The pamphlet's title calls it ten and a half feet high; its own measurement, from the top of the head to the instep, is "ten feet three inches". It put the weight at a ton and a half to two tons.

The crowds and the owners. Dr John F. Boynton of Syracuse, writing within days of the find, reported that "thousands have visited the locality within the last three days". Newell charged fifty cents a head, according to Alex Boese's history of the hoax. By the time the pamphlet went to press, "three capitalists" had bought a three-fourths interest from Newell. It lists the owners as Newell, Alfred Higgins, Dr Amos Westcott and Amos Gillett of Syracuse, David H. Hannum of Homer and William Spencer of Utica, with the showman Col. J. W. Wood as manager, and says they planned to move the giant to Syracuse and then to New York.

The first experts: a statue. Boynton, who spent most of two days at the site, concluded that it "is not a fossil, but was cut from a piece of stratified sulphate of lime", the local Onondaga gypsum, and called it "positively absurd to consider this a 'fossil man'". He took it for a work of the Jesuit missionaries of the seventeenth century, "not 300 years old". Professor James Hall, whom the pamphlet calls the State Geologist, described "a statue of crystalline gypsum (not a cast)". He saw no sign that the surrounding earth had been disturbed and judged it "the most remarkable object yet brought to light in this country". Professor Henry A. Ward of Rochester called it the work of a sculptor, from a single block. The visitors disagreed. The pamphlet reported that "the majority of visitors disagree with the opinion of Dr. Boynton, that the figure is a statue, and pronounce it a petrified man".

Marsh. O. C. Marsh, professor of palaeontology at Yale, saw the giant on the evening of 23 November 1869. In a letter written the next day from Rochester, printed in the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, he reported that it was cut from gypsum of the kind found in Onondaga County, that tool marks were "very distinct" on parts of it, and that gypsum dissolves so readily that a short burial at Cardiff would have erased them. His verdict was that it "is of very recent origin, and a most decided humbug". He added that he was surprised "that any scientific observers should not have at once detected the unmistakable evidence against its antiquity".

The maker. George Hull of Binghamton, New York, a cigar maker in the museum's description and a tobacconist in Boese's, had a block of gypsum quarried near Fort Dodge, Iowa, and carved into a human figure in Chicago in 1868. It was then buried on the farm near Cardiff. Newell was in on the scheme. The museum that now owns the giant says the idea grew from Genesis 6:4, "There were giants in the earth in those days"; Boese says Hull had argued with a Methodist minister about whether the Bible should be read literally. Hull confessed once Marsh's verdict was out.

Barnum's copy. P. T. Barnum offered to lease the giant, and instead had a plaster replica made and exhibited it in New York, where, by Boese's account, it soon drew larger crowds than the original.

Afterwards. The original belongs to Fenimore Farm, formerly The Farmers' Museum, in Cooperstown, New York, which bought it in 1947 and shows it in its main barn.

Leading explanations

A modern gypsum statue, carved in 1868 and buried to be found. Established. Marsh's reading of the tool marks dated the carving to recent times. The quarrying near Fort Dodge, the carving in Chicago and the burial on Newell's farm were Hull's work, and Hull confessed.

A petrified human giant. Rejected in October 1869. The first men of science to examine it found carved gypsum, not fossilised flesh. The belief survived among visitors, and the promoters printed it.

An old statue. Rejected in November 1869. Boynton's Jesuit carving and Hall's object of archaeological interest both required a long burial. Fresh tool marks on a soluble stone ruled that out.

Current status

Debunked. The Cardiff Giant is a gypsum statue made in 1868 and planted on a farm to be dug up. Its maker admitted it, and the Yale palaeontologist who examined it described it in writing as a recent humbug within six weeks of the find. The statue itself survives in a museum in Cooperstown, where the finding can be checked against the object.

Last reviewed: September 2026. Records are provisional. Where the evidence changes, the entry changes. Found an error? Tell us.