Coral Castle: The Latvian and the Limestone

Edward Leedskalnin stood five feet tall and weighed one hundred pounds and between nineteen twenty-three and nineteen fifty-one he quarried, shaped, and assembled more than one thousand one hundred tons of oolitic limestone into sculptures, furniture, and structures at two sites in South Florida, working alone and mostly at night, using ropes, block and tackle, and tools he fabricated himself. He accepted no assistance. On the occasions when neighbors tried to observe him working, he stopped until they left.

He built it, he said, for Agnes Scuffs of Latvia, who broke their engagement the night before their wedding when Leedskalnin was sixteen years old. He emigrated to the United States in nineteen twelve, worked in logging camps in Canada and the Pacific Northwest, and eventually arrived in Florida, where the oolitic limestone that underlies the whole peninsula proved workable with hand tools in a way that granite or marble would not have been. He quarried his material from the ground beneath his feet and shaped it in place.

The result in Homestead is a star-shaped moon fountain, a table carved in the shape of Florida, a working sundial accurate to two minutes, rocking chairs made of single pieces of stone, and a nine-ton gate balanced on a steel shaft set in a truck axle bearing, calibrated so precisely that it swings open with a light push. Engineers who disassembled and rebuilt the gate in the nineteen eighty-six have said they do not fully understand how Leedskalnin achieved the balance with the tools available to him in the nineteen twenties.

He left no coherent account of his methods. He wrote pamphlets about magnetism and electricity that are not coherent accounts of anything. He died in nineteen fifty-one of a kidney infection. Agnes Scuffs never came. The castle, which is actually made of oolitic limestone and not coral, is open for tours and has been for sixty years. Leedskalnin would have found this ironic. The place was built for one person, and she was not the public.