Cheshire Mammoth Cheese

On the corner of Church and School streets stands a concrete replica of the cider press that produced the gigantic cheese that John Leland gave to President Thomas Jefferson. In Cheshire Cemetery, Leland’s obelisk grave-marker displays a commemorative plaque, See “The Big Cheshire Cheese,” in Chapter 16.

copyrighted and used by permission from David Beale, Baptist History in England and America: Personalities, Positions, and Practices

From Wikipedia:

The Cheshire Mammoth Cheese was a gift from the town of Cheshire, Massachusetts to President Thomas Jefferson in 1802. The 1,235-pound (560 kg) cheese was created by combining the milk from every cow in the town, and made in a makeshift cheese press to handle the cheese’s size. The cheese bore the Jeffersonian motto “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”^[1]

Photo from By Makeitalready – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21619390