Description
"The Society Mansion of an Ex-Slave" - - (excerpted from longer article with photographs) - - For 92 years, a brick Victorian mansion has clung to a steep mountainside in Central City, Colo. Like an elderly grande dame in faded finery, the old square house seems lost in memories of past splendor and gayety. The mansion is called Lee House, for a former Negro slave, Jeremiah Lee, who built it in 1877. - - Jeremiah Lee was born in Virginia in 1830. It was the custom in his day for slaves to adopt the names of their masters, and it is said that Jeremiah's master was the great Southern leader, Robert E. Lee. Jeremiah Lee’s bride, Emily Washington Lee, traced her ancestry to the Mt. Vernon slave quarters of Martha Washington. General Lee’s wife, Mary Custis Lee, was the great granddaughter of Martha Washington, and it is likely that her slave, Emily Washington, received her early training in the same Arlington household as Jeremiah Lee. - - The young Negro undoubtedly received his freedom at an early age. In 1849. Lee joined the California gold rush, thus getting a start in a long and distinguished mining career. Although Lee made a good stake in California, he returned to his Southern home to settle down. For a time, the Lees engaged in farming in Missouri and Leavenworth, Kansas, but in 1859, word of the Pikes Peak gold rush brought a recurrence of Jeremiah Lee’s gold fever. The Lees teamed up with a runaway slave, Lorenzo Bowman, who had worked in the Missouri lead mines and smelters. With Pikes Peak Or Bust painted across their prairie schooner, the Lees and Bowman hitched up their oxen and started west in May 1859. Another Negro woman, Clara Brown - better known then as Aunt Clara - soon arrived and started the camp’s laundry, near the Lees’ first cabin. When the plucky Aunt Clara later returned to Missouri to bring back her relatives, the small Negro community increased by 16 members. - - The Lees’ first daughter, Alice, was born in 1862, followed in 1866 by a second, Sarah. The Lees now were respected citizens of booming Central City. In addition to their own children, Alice, Sarah, Katherine and John, the Lees adopted an orphaned Irish boy, Andy. A granddaughter, Edna Lee Halden, was born in that main floor bedroom in 1884, the daughter of Alice Lee Halden. - - Jeremiah Lee lived to see his dream realized. John was to become an engineer, and Katherine and Alice became teachers, though they were only one generation from plantation slaves. Jeremiah Lee died in January 1904, at 74. He was buried at Denver’s pioneer Riverside Cemetery and Emily was placed beside him in 1907. Through the years, 8 more members of the Lee family were carried back from Cleveland where they had moved, to share the family burial plot.Date(s) of Creation
11/30/1969
