Didn't know until this week that the giant was underground for nearly a year before anybody "found" him. George Hull, a cigar maker out of Binghamton, had a block of gypsum quarried in Fort Dodge, Iowa, shipped to Chicago, carved into a ten-foot man, then hauled east and buried behind his cousin's barn in November 1868. Then he waited. You have to admire the patience of that — eleven months of just knowing there's a stone man in the yard.
The well-diggers hit him in 1869, and within days there was a tent over the pit and a fee to go in (a quarter, then double that, because the crowds kept coming). There's a photograph of him lying on a wooden sledge in the hole with a row of men in caps standing round the edge, hats in hands, very solemn about it.
So who said "there's a sucker born every minute"? Not Barnum. Barnum wanted the giant, was told no, and simply had a plaster copy made and put it on show in New York, where it drew bigger crowds than the real fake. The line belongs to David Hannum, who'd bought into the original and watched the queues go to the duplicate instead.
He was talking about the people paying to see a copy of a hoax.
Barnum had form with the word: he'd put out a book called The Humbugs of the World a few years earlier, in 1865, half confession and half consumer guide. Humbug itself turns up in the mid-1700s as slang nobody can trace, which seems about right for it.
Gypsum was a canny choice — soft enough to carve with hand tools, and it streaks when you work it, which apparently helped it read as old skin. Real bodies don't turn to stone anyway. Bone buried in wet ground loses its collagen and the mineral slowly swaps out with whatever's in the groundwater, so you get stained, brittle bone, not a statue. Takes rather more than eleven months.