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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I-Heart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and I'm Holly Fry.

This is coming out on April Fool's Day.

So I wanted to find an episode about some kind of historical hoax or a prank.

But with the times that we're living in, not one in which anybody got seriously hurt or killed or otherwise

just harmed. And also, I did not want something like the Piltdown Man, which was a scientific

hoax that led some researchers at least just down the wrong path to wrong conclusions for years,

and then it helped erode the public's trust in science and scientists when that hoax was exposed.

So I didn't want anything with consequences like that.

We talked about The Piltdown Man in an episode that we ran as a Saturday classic back in January

of 2022. Today's hoax did lead people astray a little bit, but in a way that was fairly localized,

not so much fallout. It was called the Pompey Stone. The Pompey Stone was unearthed on the farm of Philo Cleveland,

who lived in Onondaga County, New York. He lived in Watervale. That's an area between the towns

of Manlius and Pompey. And those two towns were really interconnected, and various accounts

put Cleveland's farm in one or the other of them, but really situated in the middle.

All of this is about 15 miles or 24 kilometers southeast of Syracuse.

Coincidentally, Pompey is just a few miles east of Cardiff, New York, home to the Cardiff

Giant, which would become one of the most sensational archaeological hoaxes

in U.S. history after its purported discovery in 1869.

So in 1820 or 1821, Vilo Cleveland was cutting down trees and digging up rocks to expand a meadow on his farm.

And toward the end of the day one day,

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