May 11, 2026 | Historic, Tours, Travel
Andy, tell us about By Lantern Tours and how you help/serve your clients. By Lantern Tours offers story-driven walking tours of historic Old Town Marblehead. My wife, Marybeth, and I co-founded the business around a simple belief: Marblehead has one of the most extraordinary stories in American history, and most people have never heard it. We offer three tours: the REV250 Tour, Legends & Lore, and Ghosts & Consequences. Groups stay small by design, because the stories deserve that kind of attention. Whether you’re a first time visitor or a Marblehead local, you’ll hear things that will surprise you.
What inspired you to start your business? We live in the middle of all of this history, and once you start paying attention to it, it’s hard to stop. We’ve sat in the kitchens of colonial homes and heard the real stories of the families who built them. We’ve explored attics and basements, opened secret doors, and found trap doors leading to wells. We know which houses used to be taverns and bakeries. We’ve seen them, heard the stories, and fact-checked them to make sure they’re true. At some point we started sharing these stories with friends and family, and people leaned in. They wanted more. So we told more. That’s genuinely how this started.
What is the biggest lesson you’ve learned in running a business? That passion is the product. Marybeth and I spent our careers in advertising and marketing, and what that taught us, more than anything, is how to tell stories. When you share something with genuine passion, people feel it. That’s true whether you’re selling a national brand or walking a group of strangers through a 300-year-old street. The other thing we’ve learned is that in a small town, everything is personal. Every booking matters. Every guest who leaves happy tells three people. Every five-star review is a salesperson working for you around the clock. Marblehead has been generous to us, and we carry that with us every single tour.
What do you love most about Marblehead? That it’s real. There’s no reproduction here, no theme park version of history. The buildings are original. The streets are original. The harbor looks the way it looked when Marblehead’s men launched from it. When you walk a guest down a narrow street in Old Town and tell them the story of who lived in that house — and the house is still standing right in front of them — you can see it land. That moment of genuine connection with history doesn’t happen anywhere else quite the way it happens here. And the people. Marblehead has a character that’s entirely its own. Stubborn, proud, fiercely independent. Exactly the kind of town that would row Washington across the Delaware in a snowstorm and not make a big deal about it.
What is something people would be surprised to learn about you? That for most of our adult lives, Marybeth and I were consumed by the thing most parents are consumed by: raising our three kids. That was the priority, the focus, the full-time project. Everything else came second. At some point the kids grew up. And in that space, something unexpected happened. We started paying attention to the town we had been living in — really paying attention. The history, the stories, the houses, the harbor. We started digging. One story led to another, and we couldn’t stop. Starting a walking tour business was never the plan. The kids may be grown, but we’re still very much in their lives – and they in ours. Marybeth’s mom lives with us too. But between all of it, we’ve found something that genuinely energizes us.
More Information:
By Lantern Tours
Andy and Marybeth Maercklein, Owners
617-329-9630
[email protected]
Bylanterntours.com
Aug 21, 2025 | Activities, Historic
Photo: Judy Anderson, her husband Tom Allen and her sons Erland and Erik.
Tell us about your business and why you started it. I started Marblehead Architecture Heritage & Tours 15 years ago to share information about Marblehead’s architectural, social, and cultural history, mainly 1600s and 1700s, through illustrated public programs and walking tours about specific or timely aspects of Marblehead’s history, often to benefit other local organizations. I also provide individually scheduled walking tours for hire for visitors and residents. Even locals usually learn something new on my tours. For 16 years after 1993, when the incomparable Bette Hunt retired, I worked at the Marblehead Museum as its first year-round full-time staff member and its first administrative director. For a decade after 2000, I had the privilege of serving as the first and only specifically designated curator of the superlative Colonel Jeremiah Lee Mansion in the Museum’s century-long ownership and preservation of that exceptional house, one of America’s best from that time. After that, I wrote a book about the Lee Mansion’s spectacular and unique original hand-painted 1760s mural papers plus 7 patterns of colorful block-printed wallpapers that apparently were originally in the house.
What is the best piece of business advice you’ve ever received? After I tried twice to set up Marblehead Architecture Heritage as a non-profit, I was dissuaded by local professionals / potential board members who warned about the complex financial issues and other considerations. So instead, I try to benefit other organizations through tours or talks on specific topics, or present timely public programs for non-profits like the Marblehead Museum or Arts Association, local churches, or others in this or other communities that might be interested, so they can receive much or all of the programs’ financial benefit. Privately scheduled walking tours enable me to give back to the local history community also, sometimes through periodic donations (even if small) to the Marblehead Museum and occasional gifts of Marblehead items or ephemera that appear for sale at auctions or elsewhere.
What is your favorite spot in Marblehead, and why? Kayaking with my husband or sons around Maverick’s Island in Maverick’s Cove. Those were the first English names for Gerry’s Island (Thomas Gerry, the father of Elbridge, mid-1700s) and Little Harbor. They were referred to as “Maverick’s” because Marblehead’s town founder, Moses Maverick, was the island’s first English owner, from 1635 to 1675, according to research by Robert Booth.
What is something people would be surprised to learn about you? After grad school at USC and a ten-year art museum career in Los Angeles and at the MFA Boston, I moved to Marblehead in 1992 because of its rare pre-Revolutionary architecture and compelling social history. Since then, I’ve given countless illustrated talks at historical organizations regionally and up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and at symposia in several states, including twice at Colonial Williamsburg (in 2000 and 2010). My high point was giving an illustrated talk at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum in 2001. I am married to a wonderful but quiet man who works in the tech field. I also have two married sons, ages 38 and 40, who live in Colorado and on California’s Central Coast. They grew up in the Sierra mountains near Yosemite with their wonderful dad and spent summers with me for several years in Marblehead or travelled to a variety of places with my husband and me. For two decades through their college graduations, I spent holidays, long weekends and good times with them in California eight times a year. They love hiking, backpacking, skiing, mountain cycling sports, and surfing. (History, not so much).
For More Information:
Marblehead Architecture Heritage & Tours
Judy Anderson
MarbleheadTours.com
MarbleheadTours.com/2025_Anderson_Events
Sep 16, 2024 | Community, Historic, Non-Profit
An interview with Executive Director, Lauren McCormack
Tell us about the Marblehead Museum and the programs you offer the community. Marblehead Museum & Historical Society, Inc. is a private non-profitmuseum founded in 1898 to preserve, protect, and promote Marblehead’s past as a means of enriching the present. We have four sites in town: The 1768 Jeremiah Lee Mansion, JOJ Frost Gallery & Carolyn Lynch Education Center, and the Civil War/Grand Army of the Republic exhibit in the Old Town House, as well as our newest acquisition, the Jeremiah Lee Brick Kitchen & Slave Quarters next to the Lee Mansion. We have an object and archival collection of over 60,000 items from Marblehead’s past and invite researchers and genealogists to take advantage of our resources. We offer lectures, walking tours, programs, and events year-round, both hybrid and in-person.
What exciting projects are you working on currently? The Museum is currently working to preserve, rehabilitate, and interpret the 1768 Jeremiah Lee Brick Kitchen & Slave Quarters at 157 Washington Street. Thanks to a generous donation by Standley Goodwin in 2021, we were able to purchase the building, which was built by the Lee family to serve as a detached kitchen, coach house, and living quarters for their enslaved individuals. The building is fascinating, and we spent over 2 years working with architectural historians, archaeologists, and other scholars to study how it has changed over time. Now, we’re working to secure it for the next 250 years. At the same time, we’re working closely with scholars and public historians to develop an exhibit on the first floor about the enslaved experience in Marblehead. The second floor will be a new state-of-the-art archive and research center so we can better preserve and share our amazing historical documents and photos. The entire project budget is just over $1.4 million, and we’re actively seeking donations and grants to meet our goal.
What is your favorite spot in Marblehead, and why? I love walking around Old Burial Hill. It’s quiet and peaceful, but it’s also an opportunity to see so much of Marblehead’s past in one place – its heroes and heroines, as well as the everyday people who, over the years, made Marblehead the amazing town it was and is.
What is something people would be surprised to learn about you? Before I came to the Marblehead Museum, I worked at the USS Constitution Museum and was privileged to be on board USS Constitution when she sailed in 2012, in honor of the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812, for only the second time since the 19th century.
Marblehead Museum
Executive Director: Lauren McCormack
[email protected]; 781-631-1768
MarbleheadMuseum.org
Jun 27, 2019 | Activities, Arts, Businesses, Community, Events, Food, Historic, News, Shopping, Travel
We can’t think of summer in Marblehead without thinking about the Festival of Arts. For over 50 years, the festival has been a celebration of all things art related, attracting incredible artists from near and far. Whether you enjoy film, music, writing, painting, photography, there is something for everyone to enjoy!
Marblehead is a community bursting with arts and culture and it’s wonderful to be able to celebrate that on such a grand scale every year. We appreciate all the hard work the volunteers and board members do to create such an amazing event. A lot of time and dedication, all year round, goes into making the Festival of Arts the great success it is!
The 2019 festival runs from July 4th – July 7th. To learn more about all of the events happening around town during the week of the festival, go to our culture page – https://discovermhd.com/culture/
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