It’s a Friday morning in late June and Richard Moody is hiking, in the heat, in some corner of New Jersey.
The familiar British accent on the other end of the phone belongs to the erstwhile fighter pilot turned tour guide, who is resuming his walking tours of Cranbury later this month.
“Some people come on it who’ve got historical connections, you know, great-great-grandfather’s had a farm and all this,” Moody said by phone ahead of the first tour, scheduled for July 22. “There’s a lot to tell. I mean there’s a lot that happened in Cranbury.”
Moody, a self-described amateur historian, touched on some of that local history, from George Washington stopping in Cranbury during the Revolutionary War before the battle of Monmouth, to Union troops catching the train to head south during the Civil War.
He first got into leading walking tours in Princeton and expanded to doing them in Cranbury after moving into town. One stop in Cranbury is the property on South Main Street where Washington stayed in on June 26, 1778.
The tours are sponsored by the Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society, an organization of which Moody is a past board member.
“They’re both architectural and historic, so he’s pointing out the architecture of the various houses and buildings and then also telling about them and how they relate to Cranbury’s history,” society Vice President Audrey Smith said on June 29.
Moody said Smith approached him about doing tours in Cranbury, as there was no one doing them on a regular basis.
“And being an idiot and not able to say no, I said yes,” Moody said.
Tours take place in the summer and the fall. In addition to the one later this month, the others are scheduled for Aug. 19, Nov. 18 and Dec. 16, all starting at the Cranbury Museum at 2 p.m. There is a suggested donation of $7 per person, with proceeds going to the Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society.
Smith said that for the most part, tour-goers come from outside of Cranbury.
To reserve a spot on one of his tours, Moody can be reached at 609-819-1359.
