ABSTRACT
On 6 June 1868, a cigar manufacturer named George Hull picked out a large block of gypsum from a quarry in Fort Dodge, Iowa. After shipping the block to Chicago, he hired sculptors to shape the gypsum into a huge figure of a man. When they were done, Hull had the stone giant doused in sulfuric acid and pounded with darning needles. Then he sent it by train to a relative’s farm outside Cardiff in upstate New York, where it was planted, at Hull’s direction, in a five-foot-deep hole.
