Ed Leedskalnin spent 28 years cutting Florida limestone . Image credits: Wikimedia Commons
At the time of his death on December 7, 1951, he had managed to erect a structure made up of limestone, which he himself never managed to explain how. Leedskalnin was born in Latvia on January 12, 1887, according to the ‘About Edward Leedskalnin’ page on the official Coral Castle website. There, he bought a small piece of land for around $10-$12 and began what became his lifelong project: a monument made entirely out of stone in memory of the woman who had left him. In 1936, Leedskalnin found out that there was a plan for a housing complex near his land in Florida City and to avoid any loss of privacy, he chose to relocate his entire structure.
Because he constructed his creation mostly at night at a place in South Florida where he moved stones weighing more than the capacity of many industrial cranes of today, this was.
His whole life changed when his fiancée, whom he affectionately called his “sweet sixteen,” left him for another man. He bought a ten-acre plot of land about ten miles away in Homestead, where he relocated his complete stone carvings one by one, a process that is said to have taken two to three years, as per Visit Florida. For almost three decades, Edward Leedskalnin labored on his project without many people witnessing him doing so. He grew up in a family of average financial resources and learned stonemasonry from his own family while still in Latvia. Heartbroken, he left Europe, immigrated to the United States, and eventually settled in Florida after being diagnosed with tuberculosis.
