Lifelong Bachelor’s
Lovelorn Advice
by Jamie Jobb
Agnes Scuffs was only sixteen when her mother abruptly canceled her wedding the night before the ceremony. The intended groom, Edward Leedskalnin, was ten years older than his "Sweet Sixteen" bride-to-be. Ed knew Agnes was “a brand-new girl, not soiled.” But Mama Scuffs knew their tightly-knit Latvian community could not condone such scandal, so Agnes had to tell her suitor “No! You’re too old and too poor.”
Heartbroken, Ed fled to America alone in 1912 intending to someday send Agnes and her mother a vengeful message across the Atlantic. Indeed, Leedskalnin never recovered from his heartbreak and never returned to his homeland, remaining in America and working cross country as a logger, mason and ranch hand. After a bout with TB, he settled in South Florida in 1923 on a scrubby acre he purchased for twelve dollars and where he began to plot his revenge.
But Ed never married.
Instead the self-taught stone mason spent twenty-eight years moving and carving tons of coral rock to create -- all by himself -- a machismo monument to his failed love. Note: Ed stood all of five feet tall and weighed not quite one hundred pounds. Leverage was his friend; brute force was not.
Quack publications speculated that Ed had some special command over the electromagnetic spectrum and that he could levitate heavy objects. Ed knew his works were grounded in common mechanics.
Single-handedly with block-and-tackle but without large machines or power tools, Ed leveraged more than eleven hundred tons of coral rock into what is now known as “Coral Castle”. As we can see from the night-time illustration above, the place was quite a magnificent accomplishment located twenty miles south of Miami on U.S. Highway One.
Ed Leedskalnin resting in one of his coral rock rockers outside Miami
Leedskalnin originally called his roadside attraction “Rock Gate Park” in reference to the large nine-ton coral gate which he had perfectly balanced and hinged in the middle, so it could pivot to open in either direction.
Ed started sculpting his structures on his original acre quarry in Florida City but moved them all to their current location in 1939 when he opened the park to public tours for ten cents a head. He ran the place until 1951 when he passed away. His brother inherited the property, but sold it to a relative interested in continuing it as a quirky tourist attraction. Ed’s park was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984.
Note that Leedskalnin’s failure to marry did not result in any reluctance on his part to provide the public with plentiful unsolicited advice about an institution he himself never directly experienced!
Quoting from Ed’s guided tour: “I believe in good behavior. And if one forsakes it, one must be punished. My Repentance Corner however is not just for misbehaved children. There’s a place for Sweet Sixteen if she sasses me back. Also a place for my mother-in-law if she gets too involved in the daily activities of my wife and myself. How do I punish? Heads are placed in the openings and I lock them in with a block of wood. An hour of my counseling in that position would straighten anybody out.” Take that Mrs. Scuffs, wherever you are!
Leedskalnin’s misanthropic attitude set him up for lots of ridicule, of course, particularly among women unwilling to play second fiddle to any man. A good example is “Wild Women of Wongo”, an independent feature-length parody shot at Coral Castle after Ed died: https://archive.org/details/Brazil_666 (4:17)
That kind of mockery is unfortunate given the scope of Leedskalnin’s unique accomplishment, no matter what motivated it. Ed's legacy is one of the oddest roadside monuments you'll ever see and it's worth a visit if you ever get to Homestead, Florida.
The famous South Florida landmark offers multi-lingual self-guided audio tours (an actor speaking in first person), which were used as the narration for my two part video on Ed’s massive misguided monument to matrimony. See:
AND
For more on Coral Castle:
Coral Castle
[open daily]
28655 South Dixie Highway
Miami, FL 33033
(305) 248-6345
