Cardiff Giant
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Cardiff Giant. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
an American fraud. In 1868 an adventurer purchased a block of gypsum from a quarryman at Fort Dodge, Iowa. He shipped it to Chicago, where it was given in charge of a sculptor, who carved it into a ten foot giant. He pricked it with needles while it was soft to give the surface the appearance of the human skin, and treated it with acids to give it an ancient appearance. The giant was then packed in an iron box and shipped to Union, New York , where it was claimed by the owner, loaded on a large wagon, and drawn with four horses fifty miles to a farm near Cardiff, a post village in Onondaga County. The giant was buried and remained until October 16, 1869, nearly a year, when it was "accidentally" discovered by men who were pretending to dig a well. The petrified giant, as it was called, created the greatest astonishment. The lucky finders covered it with a tent. Special trains were run from New York City. It is estimated that 50,000 people paid a dollar apiece to see the wonder. Even men who prided themselves on scientific knowledge were for a time deceived. Finally, however, one of them broke off a fragment and discovered that it consisted, not of stone, but of gypsum, a soft substance resembling plaster of Paris. The perpetrators owned up to the fraud. The Cardiff giant was the most successful hoax ever perpetrated upon the American people. See Barnum ; Gypsum
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
the name given to a rude statue 102 feet high, dug up, in 1869, at Cardiff, N. Y., and exhibited for months as a petrification. The persons who thus deluded the public at last confessed that the "Giant" had been cut from a block of gypsum quarried at Fort Dodge, Ia., sculptured at Chicago, conveyed to Cardiff, and there buried and "accidently discovered."
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Both accounts had the essentials right, and nothing has since overturned them: George Hull bought the gypsum block at Fort Dodge, had it carved in Chicago, buried it on his relative William Newell's farm and had it "accidentally" discovered on 16 October 1869. Collier's figure of "102 feet" is a misprint — the figure is about ten and a half feet, as Aiton's says. What the 1910 and 1921 accounts could not report is where the giant ended up: after decades of touring and storage it was bought in 1947 and has been on display at the Farmers' Museum in Cooperstown, New York, ever since, while the rival copy P. T. Barnum had made survives separately in Michigan. Once a swindle, it is now a museum piece exhibited frankly as one, and the phrase "there's a sucker born every minute" is still popularly, if doubtfully, tied to the affair.
Written for this edition, 2026.