Edward Leedskalnin - Life

Life

Edward Leedskalnin was born January 12, 1887, according to World War I draft registration records, in Stāmeriena parish, Latvia. Little is known of his childhood, aside from the fact that he was not wealthy and achieved only a fourth-grade education. However Edward was a sickly boy, and often spent his time inside reading books — eventually leading him to discontinue his schooling as it "bored him". For Ed, his development of a yearning to obtain knowledge became a passionate and potent driving force in many endeavours throughout his later life. At the age of 26, he was engaged to marry Agnes Scuffs, a girl ten years younger. However, the girl that Leedskalnin referred to as his "Sweet Sixteen" broke the engagement the night before their wedding, so he emigrated to North America where he found work in various lumber camps in Canada, California, and Texas.

Then, after contracting a case of tuberculosis, Leedskalnin moved to the warmer climate of Florida around 1919, where he purchased a small piece of land in Florida City. Over the next 20 years, Leedskalnin putatively constructed and lived within a massive coral monument he called "Rock Gate Park", dedicated to the girl who had left him years before. Working alone at night, Leedskalnin eventually quarried and sculpted over 1,100 short tons (997,903 kg) of coral into a monument that would later be known as the Coral Castle. He used various basic tools, several made from timber and parts of an old Ford; first he built a house out of coral and timber, then he gradually built the monuments for which he is famous. In spite of his private nature, he eventually opened his monument to the public, offering tours for 10 cents. He was a surprisingly accommodating host, even cooking hot dogs for visiting children in a pressure cooker of his own invention.

When people asked Leedskalnin how he had moved all of the stone by himself, he refused to give over his method and would only reply to whoever was asking with the same statement: "I understand the laws of weight and leverage and I know the secrets of the people who built the pyramids (being those at the site at Giza in Egypt)."

This building was originally located in Florida City in the 1920s; then in the mid-1930s Leedskalnin hired a truck and driver to move it to its present location on a 10-acre (4.0 ha) site near Homestead, Florida. On November 9, 1951, he checked himself into Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. Leedskalnin suffered a stroke at one point, either before he left for the hospital or at the hospital. He died twenty-eight days later of pyleonephritis (a kidney infection) at the age of 64. His death certificate noted that his death was a result of "uremia; failure of kidneys, as a result of the infection and abscess."