For your Berkshires vacation or visit, follow these links for hotels, inns, bed and breakfasts, and motels in Lee, MA:
The town of Lee, with an interchange on the Massachusetts Turnpike, serves as the gateway to the Berkshires for many visitors. Lee is the location of working mills and quarries, a vibrant downtown business district, the country's tallest wooden church steeple and Joe's Diner, recognised by many to be the locale of Norman Rockwell's famous painting, "The Runaway."
The Town of Lee lies in the valley of the Housatonic River between the Taconic Range and the southernmost extent of the Green Mountains. It was first settled in 1760, relying on agriculture and lumbering, and grew quickly enough to be incorporated by 1777. The town took its name from General Charles Lee, second in command to George Washington.
The following is excerpted from a 1939 Berkshire guide book produced by the Federal Writer's Project.
"Lee, compared to Berkshire's orchid towns next door, Stockbridge and Lenox, is quiet and unostentatious. There isn't anything stylish about the town; the streets are narrow, the trim houses modest, and the people occupied with the everyday job of making a living in the paper mills and the marble quarry."
From Wikipedia: "This was once territory of the Mahican Indians. It was first settled as Dodgetown in 1760, then incorporated in 1777 as Lee. Formed from parts of Great Barrington and Washington, it was named after General Charles Lee. In the autumn of 1786 during Shay's Rebellion, about 250 followers of Daniel Shays encountered state troops commanded by General John Paterson near the village of East Lee. The Shaysites paraded a fake cannon crafted from a yarn beam, and the troops fled."