Cheshire Community Action Team

By Julie Sherwood, staff writer
Messenger Post
Posted Nov 28, 2011

In 1874, Cheshire residents Lou and Carrie Johnson built a theater in the heart of their Canandaigua hamlet. For nearly a century, what became known as the Cheshire Grange on Route 21 was a hub for locals and a draw for visitors, whether for musicals and dramas, dinners and dances, or meetings and special events.

By 1970, the building was privately owned, and most people figured its heyday as a community asset was long in its past.
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Bob McCarthy
It’s a hamlet, a crossroads stretched a little to the north and south, on NY State Route 21 between Canandaigua and Naples. To most folks in Cheshire, it’s not just a state highway; it’s a “Main Street.” Generations of locals, some now gone, attended the schoolhouse that now houses a general store and an antique shop and offers modern gas pumps. There’s an empty historic building right in the center of Cheshire, a building with a great history and an even greater future. It was built as a theater in 1874. The Civil War was not ten years’ past. Cheshire’s Main Street was then a well- ravelled wagon trail. It was sloppy with mud when it rained and dusty when it dried out. The road connected Canandaigua to the north with Naples to the South. Cheshire residents, then mostly farmers, were growing huge crops of grains, fruits and vegetables, carting them to the steamboat landings on the westside of Canandaigua Lake,
for transport to the north end of the lake, then for loading on the railroad, and then on to New York City and other points east and south.
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