Jeremiah Lee and the Spirit of '76 in Marblehead

Tour leader Judy Anderson told the Labor Day walking tour that Marblehead was the Silicon Valley of the 1700s, a place where opportunity beckoned and fortunes awaited the ambitious.

The route to wealth — centuries removed from micro-chip driven technology — sailed on cargoes of dried fish and mercantilism.

Jeremiah Lee heard opportunity knock in Marblehead in the early 1740s and arrived here with his father from Manchester, MA, Judy told the walkers.

Lee became a leading local merchant, owned a large fleet of vessels and amassed great wealth. When it came time to take a stand against British economic oppression he stood foursquare behind the Revolution, procuring armaments and gunpowder for the fight.

But for all his prominence and in spite of the opulent home he built in 1768 — now known as the Jeremiah Lee Mansion on Washington Street — the man remains an enigma, Judy said.

His personal papers do not survive and contemporary accounts of his activities during the revolt are limited.

He died in 1775, likely from injuries sustained while jumping from a window in Lexington on the eve of the April shots heard round the world.

His family's fortune waned in the post-Revolution years, as did the fortunes of many other locals.

But the lean years would have fortuitous consequences for Marblehead's architectural legacy. 

Many of Marblehead's 500 homes that stood at the time of the American Revolution — and that might have been leveled to make room for newer structures had the ensuing times been more prosperous — still stand today, Judy said.

Three hundred of those homes remain, giving Marblehead a charm and living history that is palpable, especially while walking the town. 

The Jeremiah Lee story was just one of the stories included in the Spirit of 76 tour on Monday, one of the final Marblehead Architecture Heritage & Tours of the 2013 season.

On Sunday Sept. 8, from 3 to 5 pm, a “Marblehead before and after 1813” tour will explore life and homes in Marblehead after the Revolution, when the town was still the tenth largest in America.

The tour will explain Marblehead’s difficult recovery after 1783 to the War of 1812, followed by economic improvement in the 1830s and an architectural and social transformation, until the great September gale of 1846 and construction of Abbot Hall 30 years later, according to the tour description. 

The last “First Saturdays” tour about Marblehead’s development in the 1600s will be Saturday,  Sept. 7 from 10 am to noon, starting at the corner of Beacon and Norman Streets, by Doliber’s Cove, passing Maverick’s Cove, and ending at Franklin Street.