<HTML>Hi All:
For those following the story of Coral Castle. I have just finish reading a manuscript entitled Mr “Can’t” is Dead” a biography of Ed Leedskalnin written by Orval Irwin. Orval was a life long friend and neighbor of Ed’s as well as a stonemason himself. Its not a long document (57 pages) but its loaded with stories about Ed. Why he built it. Why he relocated. How he moved it and more importantly how he built it.
Ed hired Orval (for 2$) to help him move his tools from the old Coral Castle site to its current Florida City location. There are plenty of photographs of Orval at Coral Castle with Ed and with his wife. There are also several diagrams that show how Ed quarried, lifted and moved the coral blocks.
I have copied Chatper 5 “Completion of the Project” and pasted it below. I would highly recommend buying a copy from the Coral Castle website <a href = “[
www.coralcastle.com]”>. ccStore <a>
Cheers All
Chapter V Completion of the Project
Now, with all of the major stones in the new location,
Ed had to begin the real work of building a wall. The ground
was also of rock like his old place, so again he began to dig
small trenches in a row, about six inches wide and thirty
inches deep, around a small plot, about thirty-six inches
wide and eighty-four inches long. After the trenches were
dug to an even depth, he would drive iron wedges under the
bottom edge of the plot. This would break the rock loose
from the ground, thus making it a piece of quarried stone
weighing about six and one-half tons. Each of these stones
formed one section of a main outside wall.
The next operation was to raise this stone up out of the
ground and stand it on its end straight in line with the
other stones. One must now clearly understand that Ed was
working all alone. To my knowledge, he never had any help
at anytime, or any place, to cut, design, or do anything
with any of his stones.
The weight of the stones was calculated by measuring
them and figuring out the cubic feet. He knew how much one
cubic foot weighed and so on. In raising these six and
one-half ton stones from the hole where! they were cut and
broken loose, he used the method of the~ ancient Greek
mathematician and inventor, Archimedes. It was Archimedes
who said over two thousand years ago, "Give me a fulcrum and
a lever and I can move the Earth." So, slowly, Ed would pry,
jack, chock and pry up and re-chock and so on just a little at
a time.
Once the stone was high enough, he would slip a chain
around the upper end and then make a t1:'ipod out of three
carefully selected, sturdy pine logs chained together at the
top, and set it over the stone. He would hang a chain hoist
that he could operate himself from the tripod; then he would
connect the lower hook with the chain around the stone.
Ed would very carefully and slowly' raise the stone.
Now it was necessary for him to use all safety precautions
and not to take any chances at all. If an accident had
occurred, causing him to be pinned dowI1i, there was always a
chance that a visitor might not happen to come by to see him
for several days.
This process of wall raising went on for many weeks.
Of course when anyone approached, he would stop his work.
Due to the magnitude of this operation and the weight of
these multi-ton stones, it was just good common "horse
sense" not to work with anyone around!
There is an old proverb that defines "success" as
"ninety per cent perspiration." I am sure that this
definition applies here. Often, over and over in my mind,
these questions kept coming up; Why did that old guy work
so hard? Why did he do all of that an1~ay? And just what
did he try to prove?
There are sixty-five of these stone sections in the wall;
and I have an idea that a lot of them absorbed about one week's
( work each. Then came the building of the tower, with the
floor about ten feet high above the ground level; this upper
room was the living quarters, and down below was his equipment
or tool room.
The same slow process was used in the building of the
tower, except that the tripod poles had to be higher and
stronger, and a more sophisticated triple block chain hoist
had to be used. Of course, all of the work was still done by
himself. After many months and weeks c>f hard work, sometime
in or about 1940, his major work was complete. He kept
working on the smaller stones, such as his well, small
entrance gate and some general cleaning up such as filling the
massive holes that the huge wall stones came out of.
One day late in 1940, I asked a new friend of mine, who
was a watchmaker, to go up and see 'Ed' So Rock Gate Castle. He
said, "You know, I have met that fello\'0r. He came in the
store recently to have his watch cleaned." He went on to
tell me how amazed he was when he looked into his watch. The
mainspring had broken, and Ed had taken the entire watch
apart. Then very carefully he had heafed both ends of the
delicate spring to the precise temperature needed and bent
them back in a hook fashion so that the! spring interlocked
perfectly. After that he reassembled the watch to its
perfect condition. It did not run, on].y because it was
dirty and needed to be cleaned. r-ly watchmaker friend was
( astounded, because, as he said, "There are very few skilled
watchmakers who can accomplish a feat like that."
( , Here was a remarkable man, Edward Leedskalnin, who
weighed one hundred and twenty pounds and had handled one
thousand and one hundred tons of heavy stone pieces all
alone, yet had the finesse to repair a watch with a very
delicate problem.
The dedication and determination had paid off for this
man. I don't believe that Ed had stopped this desperately
hard work since the day I hauled his tcols and equipment up
to his new location. Like the closing words to an old hymn,
"Life's Railway To Heaven," he had kept. his hand on the
throttle, and his eye on the rail!</HTML>
