Marblehead Architecture Heritage & Tours

Marblehead Architecture Heritage & Tours offers friendly, conversational guided walking tours of downtown Marblehead, focusing on the town’s social history and its rare early architecture. Tours are available for private groups or individuals, by appointment or by chance, and topics and times are flexible. Themes include the town’s dramatic first 100 years, its rugged setting and storied past, and covert operations during the Revolution, spanning more than 400 years of local history.

The guide, Judy Anderson, is a social and cultural historian who focuses on architecture, daily life, and women’s and family history. She was curator of Marblehead’s Jeremiah Lee Mansion for a decade and worked with the house for 16 years. She wrote a book about the mansion and its original English hand-painted wallpaper from the 1760s, which covers the walls of several rooms and the mansion’s soaring stair hall.

What to Know

• The mansion’s 18th-century wallpaper murals are the only ones of their kind in the world still in place.
• The only other surviving suite of similar English wallpapers is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
• Anderson also gives talks on the mansion, early Marblehead architecture, decorative arts and historic interiors.