Interestingly enough Google Ngram shows high occurence of the word "lede" (with varying capitalization) in the 1800s with two peaks around 1815 and 1860, and then heavily declining usage.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=lede&case_inse...
EDIT: Graphing lede,lead shows that 'lead' has always been in the lead with respect to usage. However, expanding the corpus timeline shows almost competing usage in 1564!
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=lede%2Clead&ca...