Suspense Magazine November 2012

By Donald Allen Kirch
Coral Castle:
A Monument to Love
The human mind has many ways to
express the emotion of love. Sonnets, paintings,
simple letters of a heart willing to accept almost any flaw just for that one
sweet moment of absolute perfection. Still, one monument in Florida
stands out amongst the crowd as not only a marvel but as a tribute to
the sad “unrequited” side of that emotion. It is simply called “The Coral
Castle.” What makes it a marvel is that it is composed of almost eleven
hundred short tons of rock, built by one five-foot, one-hundred-twentypound
man. He allowed no one to help him, and engineers today cannot
guess how he accomplished the act.
One thing is for certain: when asked, several times, as to why he had
built the structure, the man would smile and say, “For my sweet sixteen.”
His name was Ed Leedskalnin.
Not much is known about the strange emigrant who came to the United States from Latvia. He was an amateur sculptor
who finally settled in Florida City, Florida, and was known for his rather unusual theories on magnetism.
The only record of Leedskalnin’s birth comes from World War I draft registration records. He was born on January 12,
1887. Not much is known of his childhood, except that he was from a poor family, and achieved, officially, only a fourthgrade
education. Ed was a sickly kid and spent most of his formative years alone, inside reading books. He had a passion
for reading that went far above his educational level and quit schooling, stating that it “bored him.” For Ed, his passion for
knowledge became the compass that guided his life.
Like most young men, Ed tried to make a good life, find a trade, and eventually fall in love and marry. At the age of
twenty-six, he was engaged to Agnes Scuffs, a woman ten years younger than himself. He was remarkably happy for the first
and last time in his life. However, upon the eve of his marriage, the woman he referred to as his “sweet sixteen,” broke their
20 Suspense Magazine November 2012 / Vol. 040