Edward Leedskalnin

Biography

Edward Leedskalnin died on 7 December 1951 in Miami, twenty-eight days after he had checked himself into Jackson Memorial Hospital. By then the limestone castle in southern Florida was his only conspicuous achievement, and the secret of how he built it went with him.

He was born on 12 January 1887 (31 December 1886, Old Style) in Stāmeriena Parish, Valka District, Governorate of Livonia, to Andrejs and Mina Liedskalniņš, tenant farmers; he was the fifth son. He finished four grades of school, read a great deal, and is believed to have learned stonemasonry from his father. His relatives took part in the peasant unrest of 1905.

He left Latvia around 1910. His own explanation was that his fiancée, whom he called his “Sweet Sixteen”, broke off the engagement before the wedding. It has been established that the girl was named Hermīne Lūse and was only two years younger than he was; her father may have prevented the marriage. What really lay behind the departure is hard to check. Leedskalnin lived first in London, then in Halifax, Canada, and on 7 April 1912, according to one account, he arrived in New York. He looked for work on the East Coast, then moved to the Pacific Northwest, where a logging boom was under way. In 1917, in Oregon, he was recorded as self-employed, making ax handles, and the 1920 census places him in Reedsport. Other sources also name California and Texas, where he worked in logging camps.

In the winter of 1922–1923 (by other accounts, around 1919), after tuberculosis, he moved to the warm climate of Florida and bought a small plot in Florida City. In February 1923 the local newspaper The Homestead Enterprise reported that a Californian named Leedskalnin had bought an acre of land and was planning to build a home soon. He first built himself a house of limestone blocks and wood, then began a stone complex that he called “Rock Gate” and dedicated, in his words, to the girl who had left him. He worked alone and mostly at night. His tools were simple: homemade levers, pulleys, old automobile parts, timber. In all he quarried and shaped more than 1,100 short tons of oolite limestone. The structure was later named the Coral Castle.

When people asked how he handled such blocks, he usually answered that he understood the laws of weight and leverage and knew the secrets of the people who built the pyramids. Some local residents remembered visiting the site as schoolchildren, when he showed them his manual methods himself. He stood about 152 cm (five feet) tall and weighed around 54 kg (120 pounds). Many explanations of his work have been offered, from antigravity to ordinary levers, pulleys, ramps and wedges; no documents settle the argument. I find the last explanation more convincing, but I cannot prove it.

In 1936 a multistorey apartment building was planned next door, and Leedskalnin decided to leave. He bought land in Homestead, 16 kilometres to the north, hired a truck with a driver and moved the castle there; by other accounts, the move took place between 1937 and 1939. Later he admitted visitors for ten cents a tour.

He published five pamphlets, advertising them in local newspapers. The first, “A Book in Every Home”, contains his reflections on bringing up children, the story of his “Sweet Sixteen” and his political views; it is printed only on the left-hand pages, with the right-hand pages left for the reader’s objections. The others deal with magnetism, among them “Magnetic Current” (1945). In them he claimed that the real magnets move inside metal, that scientists see only “one half” of the picture, and he proposed simple experiments.

Billy Idol recorded the song “Sweet Sixteen” based on his story, and its video was filmed at the castle in 1986. The castle was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984.