a.k.a. V.J.

Last June, while visiting Cooperstown, I visited a museum featuring a display of a stone figure known as The Cardiff Giant.

The TL;DR version of The Cardiff Giant’s story is that in 1869, a religious skeptic named George Hull created a statue of a giant man, buried it on a farm in the tiny hamlet of Cardiff, N.Y., “discovered” it there, and then tried to pass it off as the fossil of a species of gigantic humanoid who supposedly walked the Earth in Biblical times. His motivation was to prove the gullibility of the public, and based on the crowds that the Giant attracted, Hull seems to have been on to something with his hypothesis. Eventually the Giant was revealed as a hoax and the American people seemed to have been at once amused, outraged, and/or embarrassed by the whole thing.

When I saw the exhibit, it struck me as odd that The Cardiff Giant was on display in Cooperstown. Cardiff is in Onondaga County, so Syracuse would have been a more natural exhibit site. Hull was a Binghamton native, so that city would have made sense also. But for whatever reason, the Giant’s current resting place is about 70 miles from the birthplace of the hoax. I made a mental note at the time to try to check out Cardiff sometime, as it’s less than an hour’s drive from my home.

As luck would have it, on the way back from our trip to Tinker Falls, I noticed on the map that a short detour would take us straight through Cardiff. That was probably the best excuse I was ever going to get to go there in search of some historical marker, so off we went.

Cardiff looks like it probably hasn’t changed all that much since 1869. It’s an agricultural community amid rolling green hills. It’s apple country. Dairy country, too. The place could be on a postcard and represents what is probably a lot of peoples’ Platonic ideal of Americana or The Heartland. Cardiff looks nothing like it might be the origin point of one of the biggest frauds of the 19th Century…which is precisely why it was the perfect place to perpetrate said fraud.

The roadside marker commemorating the Cardiff Giant was faded and weatherbeaten, and it was dated 1976; a neglected monument to a largely forgotten and disreputable piece of local lore.

When I pulled over on the side of the road to snap photos of the sign, I wondered if some locals might spy me from afar and wonder what kind of a damn fool would take the time to pull off and take a picture of a ratty 50-year-old sign. Or maybe they would just smile knowingly. It’s not like I was the first fool who was ever drawn to their town by the legend of the Cardiff Giant.