When Giants Roamed the Earth	Volume 58 Number 6, November/December 2005
by Mark Rose

In the Golden Age of hoaxes, petrified men came to life.

Mark Twain parodied petrifaction hoaxes with his account of the discovery of one, which some newspapers took as a true story. He also aimed his humor at the Cardiff Giant. [LARGER IMAGE]

Gideon Emmons and Henry Nichols are nowhere listed among the heroes of American archaeology, but the discovery they made on October 16, 1869, captured the nation's imagination. Digging a well on the farm of William "Stub" Newell in the hamlet of Cardiff, New York, they hit stone three feet down. Clearing the soil, they recognized the shape of a foot, and one of them uttered the immortal words, "I declare, some old Indian has been buried here!"

Soon they had unearthed a colossal stone figure more than 10 feet from head to toe. What Emmons and Nichols didn't know was the stone man was the creation of Binghamton cigar maker George Hull, who was Newell's cousin, and that Hull and Newell had planted it there nearly a year before. Hundreds of people flocked to see the marvel. Newell set up a tent over it and started charging 25¢ a head. Business was so brisk that he increased it to 50¢ two days later.

Andrew White, first president of Cornell University, later described his visit: "The roads were crowded with buggies, carriages, and even omnibuses from the city, and with lumber-wagons from the farms--all laden with passengers." The giant was an impressive sight. "Lying in its grave," wrote White, "with the subdued light from the roof of the tent falling upon it, and with the limbs contorted as if in a death struggle, it produced a most weird effect. An air of great solemnity pervaded the place. Visitors hardly spoke above a whisper."

White nonetheless recognized immediately that the giant was a hoax: it was obviously a statue, and not a very good one, and there was no reason for the two laborers to have been digging a well at the spot they found it. Even so, White overheard "a very excellent doctor of divinity, pastor of one of the largest churches in Syracuse" declare that, "Is it not strange that any human being, after seeing this wonderfully preserved figure, can deny the evidence of his senses, and refuse to believe, what is so evidently the fact, that we have here a fossilized human being, perhaps one of the giants mentioned in Scripture?"

"Therefore it was," recalled White, "that, in spite of all scientific reasons to the contrary, the work was very generally accepted as a petrified human being of colossal size, and became known as 'the Cardiff Giant.'"

Mark Rose is executive editor of ARCHAEOLOGY.

© 2005 by the Archaeological Institute of America www.archaeology.org/0511/abstracts/petrified.html

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