The Ten-Foot Stone Statue That an Atheist Buried on a Farm to Prove a Point and Was Then Bought by a Syndicate for $37,500

In June 1867 the New York cigar-maker George Hull had an argument with a Methodist preacher at his sister’s house in Ackley, Iowa, about Genesis 6:4 — “There were giants in the earth in those days.” Hull, an atheist, decided to manufacture physical evidence that would force the preacher into either accepting the giants or doubting the literal truth of the Bible.

The plan took eighteen months and approximately $2,600 (about $60,000 in 2025 dollars).

Manufacture

In June 1868 Hull bought a five-ton block of gypsum at a Fort Dodge, Iowa, quarry. He shipped it to Chicago and contracted the German-born stonecutter Edward Burghardt to carve a ten-foot human figure from it. The carving took several months. Burghardt and his assistants worked behind a tarpaulin screen in a Chicago barn and were paid in cash to prevent gossip.

Hull aged the surface by hammering it with darning needles (to simulate ancient skin-pore weathering) and bathing it in sulphuric acid. He shipped the figure by railcar in November 1868 to Binghamton, New York, then by horse-and-wagon to his cousin William Newell’s farm near Cardiff, in Onondaga County. The two men buried it three feet deep behind Newell’s barn.

They waited eleven months for the surrounding soil to settle naturally.

Discovery

On 16 October 1869 Newell hired two well-diggers to dig a new well behind the barn. The well location was, of course, chosen by Newell to be directly over the buried statue. The diggers struck the foot at about three feet down. Within hours the whole figure was excavated.

Newell charged twenty-five cents per visitor to see the giant, then fifty cents. Within a week there were daily railroad excursions from Syracuse. The Cardiff Giant generated approximately $7,000 in admission revenue in its first three weeks.

A syndicate organised by the Syracuse banker David Hannum bought a three-quarter share from Newell on 23 October 1869 for $37,500 (about $850,000 in 2025 dollars). The syndicate moved the giant to a Syracuse exhibition hall and continued charging admission.

Barnum and the second giant

P. T. Barnum offered $50,000 to buy the giant outright in late October. The syndicate refused. Barnum hired his own sculptor to produce an exact-replica plaster copy in three weeks, declared the original a fake, and began exhibiting his replica in New York City as the genuine article. Hannum, asked about Barnum’s behaviour, reportedly told a reporter that “there’s a sucker born every minute” — the line is conventionally attributed to Barnum but actually originates with Hannum complaining about Barnum.

The syndicate sued Barnum. The court hearing in February 1870 was an unusual one because by then Hull had confessed: he had told the Chicago Tribune on 10 December 1869 that the whole thing was a fabrication. The judge ruled that since the original was fake, Barnum’s fake of the fake could not constitute fraud.

The statue

The original Cardiff Giant passed through several owners after the 1870 court case and is now displayed at the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, New York. Barnum’s plaster copy is at Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum in Farmington Hills, Michigan.

Hull died in 1902 in Binghamton, having spent the proceeds. He had not, in his thirty-three years between the confession and his death, ever returned to the Cardiff theological argument that had started the project.