Canandaigua

Canandaigua, a village and the county-seat of Ontario county, New York, U.S.A., 30 m. S.E. of Rochester. Pop. (1890) 5868; (1900) 6151; (1910) 7217. It is served by the New York Central and Hudson River, and the Northern Central (Pennsylvania system) railways, and is connected with Rochester by an inter-urban electric line. Among the manufactures are pressed bricks, tile, beer, ploughs, flour, agate and tin-ware. The village, picturesquely situated at the north end of Canandaigua Lake, a beautiful sheet of water about 15 m. long with a breadth varying from a mile to a mile and a half, is a summer resort. It has a county court house; the Canandaigua hospital of physicians and surgeons; the Frederick Ferris Thompson memorial hospital, with a bacteriological laboratory supported by the county; the Clark Manor House (a county home for the aged), given by Mrs Frederick Ferris Thompson in memory of her mother and of her father, Myron Holley Clark (1806-1892), president of the village of Canandaigua in 1850-1851 and governor of New York in 1855-1857; the Ontario Orphan Asylum; Canandaigua Academy; Granger Place school for girls; Brigham Hall (a private sanatorium for nervous and mental diseases); Young Men’s Christian Association building (1905); and two libraries, the Wood (public) library and the Union School library, founded in 1795. There is a public playground in the village with free instruction by a physical director; and a swimming school, endowed by Mrs F.F. Thompson, gives free lessons in swimming. The village owns its water-supply system. A village of the Seneca Indians, near the present Canandaigua, bearing the same name, which means “a settlement was formerly there” (not, as Lewis Morgan thought, “chosen spot”), was destroyed by Gen. John Sullivan in 1779. There are boulder memorials of Sullivan’s expedition and of the treaty signed here on the 11th of November 1794 by Timothy Pickering, on behalf of the United States with the Six Nations—a treaty never ratified by the Senate. Canandaigua was settled in 1789 and was first incorporated in 1812.

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