Brunswick Georgia 9 foot skeleton
Brunswick Georgia 9 foot skeleton
A giant’s skeleton has been unearthed at Brunswick, Ga, which is nearly nine feet long.
Research done by Rephaim23
Seeking to extend what would later become the northerly reach of Norwich Street more than 125 years ago, the city of Brunswick had city Superintendent of Cemeteries Jacob Dart and his crew take apart a suspected Native American burial mound roughly a mile out from the city limits.
That is when they discovered the giant.
“The mound contained one frame of a human who must have been a very near relative of old Goliath,” reported the Atlanta Constitution on Aug. 3, 1892. “This was indeed a giant, such as is never seen these days. A measurement of the bones shows that this human was more than eight and nearly nine feet tall and heavily built in proportion.
“Down a leg bone of this monster had grown a huge root of a tree and in the roomy skull was a peck of sand.”
The story caught fire and hit the news wires. These days, old newspaper clips have a new life on social media, and May 31, the Twitter account @PoeticDevotions shared a clip from the Opelousas, La., newspaper, the St. Landry Clarion, that included a sentence on the giant in a roundup of gossipy news titled “Table Talk.”
The Clarion published that in November 1892, while the Fort Worth Gazette in Texas mentioned the skeleton in its Sept. 15, 1892 edition.
The person behind the account @HorribleSanity, who frequently tweets old news stories, found the Brunswick account in the Atlanta Constitution. Archives of Brunswick newspapers are more miss than hit prior to World War II.
As we might treat these news accounts as a curiosity, Brunswickians took a look at these human remains with eyes agog. And as opposed to now, when such burial mounds are protected by law, what the workers recovered from the mound were not treated with the same reverence. The supposed 9-foot man’s jawbones went on display at Doerflinger’s, a saloon and restaurant in the 300 block of Bay Street.
The story on the Brunswick giant describes the mound as possibly 300-400 years old, with its “elevation … six feet from the surface(,) and in the center grew a large oak three and one-half feet in diameter ….” The mound, in addition to the 9-foot skeleton, contained the remains of four other people, placed into the ground standing up.
“About them was a large circle of oyster shells and inside of these shells and next to the bones was a heavy layer of charcoal” that was believed to have been used as a preservative, according to the story.
Fort Worth Gazette sept 15, 1892 pg 12.
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