The following is an interview with Andy Maercklein, owner of By Lantern Tours, conducted by Discover Marblehead. By Lantern Tours, launched this spring, provides immersive, story-driven walking tours through the historic streets of Marblehead and Salem. Their lantern-lit tours bring local history to life with fascinating stories, legends, maritime history and revolutionary tales that go far beyond the typical history lesson. From Marblehead’s role in the American Revolution to the town’s most intriguing lore, each tour is designed to be engaging, personal and memorable. To book a walking tour, go to ByLanternTours.com.
Andy, tell us about By Lantern Tours and how you help/serve your clients. 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 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.
The business spotlight is a weekly feature published in partnership with Discover Marblehead. Discover Marblehead is “dedicated to the promotion of Marblehead, Massachusetts. Our mission is to highlight local businesses, tourism, community events and attractions through social media, email marketing and community outreach.” To learn more, visit discovermhd.com.
