It Happened Here- "Giants in the Earth"
As the eighteen century turned into the nineteenth century the opening of the vast North American continent spawned interest in the great number of species discovered and yet-to-be discovered. American naturalists such as John and William Bartrand (botanists) and John James Audubon (naturalist /ornithologist) began their explorations, categorizing and recording their discoveries through drawings, paintings and collections. Charles Wilson Peale was a successful portrait artist who painted the portraits of many early American leaders, including Washington, Franklin, Jefferson and Hamilton, and many Continental Army officers. He also became a proficient self taught taxidermist who built an extensive collection of American animals. These became the core of his " Philadelphia Museum" along with other natural science specimens he had acquired in his travels.
At the same time, interest in the natural sciences was burgeoning in Europe. French author and naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon wrote a massive compendium of natural history that ran to thirty six volumes with another fourteen volumes contemplated. In the ninth volume he put forth a theory that the animals and people of the new world were smaller and inferior to the animals and people of the old world (Europe/Africa/Asia) because of the Americas "colder, wetter climate" and it would/could not be otherwise. One American who took exception to this was Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson corresponded with Buffon, directing James Madison to measure an American weasel to compare it with its European counterpart and even going to the extraordinary lengths of sending Buffon a stuffed Vermont bull moose! Jefferson was also aware of the of the exceptionally large bones coming out of the Kentucky "Big Bone Salt Lick" (see NYSHMs: It Happened Here "Marker for a Mastodon" Feb. 11, 2014.) (He had several samples in his house, Monticello) Since the notion of species extinction had not been widely circulated he would undoubtedly advised Lewis and Clark to keep an eye out for these critters on their expedition of discovery in the Louisiana Purchase.
Much closer to home, Jefferson heard about farmers uncovering large bones in swamps near Newburgh, NY. John Masten, the farmer who owned one of three swamps had accumulated a large number of the bones that he kept in his granary and let curious people in to see them, for a fee. Jefferson sent Masten an offer to buy them but it was declined. When Charles Wilson Peale heard about the bones, Jefferson encouraged him to pursue their purchase . Peale was able to succeed where Jefferson failed, going to the Montgomery farmer, offering him $200, (about $4000, today), gowns for his wife and daughters and a double barrel shotgun for his son, for the farmer's bone collection. Another $100 secured the rights to excavate the swamp for any bones that might be found.
At the Barber Site, Rte 17k, Montgomery, across from school
In the spring of 1801 Peale set out for New York's Orange Co. with a $500 dollar loan from the American Philological Society, a couple bilge pumps from the U.S. Navy and some U.S. Army tents (probably courtesy of President Jefferson's influence) to hire local workers in what has been called the first U.S. scientific expedition. Encountering a flooded site (to the depth of 12 feet!) he devised an ingenious device. A continuous chain [1] with buckets attached would run down into the flooded sump to carry water up above the edge of the excavation where they would empty their contents into a sluice-way that would drain the water off, away from the site. The series of buckets was connected to/powered by a belt /rope connected to a large wheel in the center of which was a treadmill where a crew of three workers walking , would turn the wheel, powering the belt of buckets.
A Swampy pond, Behind Marker, Probably the excavation site
Remarkably efficient, the invention, Peale calculated, could evacuate 1440 gallons per hour, and it was such a novelty he discovered farm boys were lining up to work the curious device--walk the treadmill, for free! Between 1806 and 1808 Peale would paint a picture, The Exhumation of the Mastodon that clearly illustrates his invention. In the months that followed, Peale was able to excavate marl swamps at the Barber and Millspaw farms as well as the Masten property and recover enough bones to recreate two mastodon skeletons. His son Rembrandt Peale and servant (slave), Moses Williams assembled the skeletons, recreating missing bones carved from wood and part of a cranium and tusks from paper-mache.
The skeletons created a sensation. Building a separate room in his museum and charging a 50 cent surcharge, Peale quickly recouped his debts and expenses from the expedition. His museum helped precipitate a wave of enthusiasm both for legitimate museums of natural science and history, and public (pay to view) exhibits of freaks and oddities of dubious authenticity. Undoubtedly, proud of his acquisition, he would paint two self portraits. In one he shares his portrait with a giant bone from one of his mastodons; in the other he dramatically lifts a curtain to reveal his museum with a mastodon standing behind his artist's pallet.
Over the years the museum would move several times and have its ups and downs. At one point it would occupy the former Pennsylvania State House Building, "Independence Hall." In 1849 Peale's children would break up and sell the collection to pay off accumulated debts. One of the mastodons was dismantled with parts of it ending up in many hands. P.T. Barnum bought many of the exhibits. It was thought the other mastodon was destroyed when Barnum's American Museum in New York burned in one of two fires in 1864 or 1865. However, in recent years it was discovered that Peale's children had taken the surviving intact mastodon to Europe in hopes of finding a buyer. There it had languished in storage for years until German naturalist Johann Jakob Kaup bought it for the Grand Ducal Museum of Hesse purchasing it at a bargain price. During World War II the museum in which it was housed in Darmstadt was extensively damaged in the bombing raids but the mastodon survived with only its paper-mache tusks having been destroyed. In 2020 it would return to the United States for a visit as part a of Smithsonian sponsored exhibit.
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While broadly, the Enlightenment, and more specifically interest in the natural sciences had created interest in finding the first "giants in the earth" in New York State, our second "giant in the earth" was "discovered" as the result of interest in--or more accurately-- opposition to, another social-cultural movement, the "Second Great Awakening"some six decades later. George Hull was a cigar-maker and businessman, born in Connecticut's tobacco-leaf growing region, but raised in central New York in an area which, because of the intensity of religious fervor being generated there became known as the "burned over district". Growing up, George had worked for a couple preachers doing work for them on their farms. Both experiences had left him feeling exploited and cheated, and though he had been brought up reading the bible and could quote quite extensively from it, he became disinclined toward religiosity. As an adult, his cigar business suffered from inattention as he pursued various get rich quick schemes while unpaid debts and unpaid taxes mounted. Seeking to escape his debts, he moved his family to Wisconsin after setting his home and business on fire to collect the fire insurance [2]. There he reestablished his cigar manufacturing business, employing others to sell his cigars. When one of his salesman, an in-law working in Iowa began having financial difficulties, Hull visited him to help him straighten out his business affairs (and get payment for his most recent consignment of cigars.) While staying at the salesman's home Hull was joined by a traveling revival preacher, the family had invited to stay with them , while he was holding tent-revival meetings in their town. Over several days, Hull and the preacher had extensive conversations. The preacher believed in the literalness and inerrancy of the Bible--positions which infuriated Hull.
One of the biblical passages Hull and the preacher debated was Genesis 6:4. "There were giants in the earth those days..." A few days after their conversations, Hull began to formulate a scheme. If he could "create " a giant, bury it somewhere to have it "discovered," then he could create a sensation with biblical literalists and lead them to declare they had found proof of the bible's veracity. Then, after he had created a suitable hullaballoo he could reveal the hoax, embarrassing the religionists that had used the giant as a proof of the bible's truth. Additionally, he expected to make a large amount of money by charging admission for people to see the giant, and even after the hoax had been revealed, charge people again who still wanted to see the hoax to see if they, themselves, would have been fooled . (This, of course, was something P.T. Barnum had been doing with great success.)
To finance his scheme, Hull burned down his heavily insured cigar factory for its fire insurance and moved to Iowa where he obtained a large block of native gypsum and partnered with a Chicago marble dealer and a couple of stone carvers to create a 10 foot recumbent naked figure modeled after Hull himself! He had it shipped by railroad in a box labelled "farm machinery" to Binghamton. Re-boxed in a sturdy iron-bound crate, Hull's Giant was transported by Hull and several accomplices by night in a heavy army wagon to the Cardiff, New York farm of "Stub" Newell, a distant relative. There it was buried, tucked under the root of a long dead tree to make it appear as if it had been in the earth a long time.
After nearly three years Hull contacted Newell to tell him it was time to dig a new well on his property. "Stub" directed the well diggers to the spot he had chosen and guess what they found! News of the discovery exploded! Within 24 hours hundreds of people from farms all around the area had visited the site. Newell rushed to buy a large tent and hire family and neighbors to take money and control the crowds. Within a week thousands would visit and secondary businesses began to appear as farmers wives showed up along the roads to sell pies and sandwiches to visitors and farmers abandoned their fields to shuttle the curious in their farm wagons from Syracuse to Cardiff and back for sizable fees, or, to and from Tully and Lafayette, nearby towns serviced by the railroad. Within a few weeks omnibuses were making scheduled runs from Syracuse, hot meals could be obtained along the roads entering Cardiff and slabwood-board "taverns" were offering adult refreshment for the thirsty.
Debates began immediately. Was the giant a "petrification" or an ancient statue from a long lost, (apparently) caucasian civilization? [3]. Early visitors to the site, state geologist James Hall, Jr. and John Boynton, a scientific lecturer with experience in paleontology doubted that it was a natural phenomenon citing lack of case evidence that soft tissue could petrify and lack of stratigraphy in the area consistent with the gypsum giant. On the other hand, antiquarians, the forerunners of archeologists, were at a lost to connect the giant to any known culture or connect its sculptor to any group of people. A hypothesis that Jesuits might have sculpted it to impress their Indian converts simply didn't merit any credibility. For his part, George Hull was disappointed that the multitudes of biblical literalists were not rushing forth to proclaim that here was proof of the factuality of the Old Testament's stories.
Hull could only sit back and watch the money roll in, while, operating behind the scenes, he negotiated through Stubs Newell the sale of the Giant. Eventually one of several competing syndicates of investors won out, buying a 3/4 share of the Giant for $40,000 (over $1million, today) [4] and exhibiting it in Syracuse and Albany. Rumors of the deal caught the attention of P.T. Barnum whose offers to buy it from them were rebuffed. Undeterred, Barnum sought to have his own Cardiff Giant. He arranged to buy a copy, advertising it as the real Giant, introducing it to New York City via a spectacular parade up Broadway to Wood's Museum, the successor to Barnum's American Museum, destroyed a few years earlier. (Eventually the fake petrified giant, that inspired this fake-fake would inspire perhaps as many as a dozen other fakes to be displayed in ever smaller venues in traveling circus sideshows, carnivals, and county fair midways across the U.S. for decades to come.)
George Hull was "spot on" in his anticipation of the high levels of curiosity his Giant would create (not to mention its profitability) but he over-estimated the impact it would have on religious discussion and debate. The fact was, by the end of the 1860's, the "Second Great Awakening"in New York had mostly run its course. All those people susceptible to calls for personal salvation had pretty much sought it out; the Millerites who predicted a date for the resurrection of Christ, had seen the date come and go with no apparent resurrection; the Mormons had largely left the state, taking their revolutionary ideas with them. What was mainly left was fatigue and skepticism. In the absence of any compelling narrative as to what the giant was, or how it got there, skepticism grew about the giant, as well. What else could it be but a Hoax! Rumors and stories containing circumstantial evidence of a flim-flam began to circulate. Who was this mysterious George Hull who was seen several years before and now was back again? Why did Newell suddenly decide he needed a second well when he only had a couple cows and a few other farm animals, when he had a perfectly good well and why did he direct the well diggers to dig to the depth of 4 feet, exactly the depth of the giant? Despite Hull's secrecy, people had observed Hull transporting his mysterious cargo in the iron-bound crate. These and other stories came to light. At first Hull ridiculed the stories circulating. Hull protested that he was an honest tobacconist who was expanding his business by selling tobacco growing farm machinery to his farmer-suppliers. But then following the sale of the Giant to the syndicate investors, local bank employees reported Stub Newell had transferred $ 9.400 to George Hull, After that it was only a matter of time before the story all came out, including confessions by the sculptors.
Though discredited, the Giant continued to make money for a series of owners, though with decreasing popularity. Finally, after a disappointing showing at the 1901 Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, the Giant was retired to a barn in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. In the twentieth century the Giant came in and out of retirement a couple of times for exhibition in state fairs before suffering the indignity of serving as a kind of oversized coffee table at the home of an eccentric newspaper publisher. It was bought by the Farmers' Museum in Cooperstown (now known as The Fenimore Farm and Country Village) in 1948, where it continues to be exhibited.
[1] The chain pictured in Peale's painting appears akin to a colonial surveyor's chain with extended links.
[2] Hull led a life filled with petty crime, shady business deals, tax evasions and various grifts. In one of his earliest grifts , he partnered with a co-conspirator who would sell hotel patrons marked playing cards. Then Hull would arrive in a day or so to engage the patrons in "friendly" games of poker and use the patron's own marked cards they had bought to clean them out of cash. Arson, however, was probably his most serious crime.
[3] Remember, Hull had modeled the stone figure after himself. Local Onondaga Native Americans, who were among the first to view it had a rich tradition of legends and folklore that included giants but when they saw it, they concluded it was "no Indian" and pretty much lost interest in the debate.
[4] Different sources cite different amounts.
--articles on Charles Wilson Peale's Mastodon abound on the web. Two that I found especially helpful are--- Sellers .Charles Coleman. Unearthing the Mastodon. American Heritage. Aug/Sept. 1979, vol.30 Issue 5. and Sues, Hans-Dieter. The Story of Charles Wilson Peale's Massive Mastodon. Smithsonian Magazine. May 6, 2020.
--again, articles abound on the Cardiff Giant but a short book A Colossal Hoax by Scott Tribble, 2009 is exhaustively researched and most thorough.
Marker of the Week Fortnight (!) --Winifred gets her Marker
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