BEVERLY — A developer plans to build a child care center for infants through kindergartners on Essex Street next to Kelleher's Pond.

The center will be built on the current site of Kelleher Construction, one of the city's oldest family-owned businesses. Kelleher Construction President John Kelleher III said his company will move to Sam Fonzo Drive, near Beverly Airport.

"We're staying in Beverly, which I'm quite pleased about because we've always been here," he said.

Kelleher said he has sold the company's 21-acre site on Essex Street to Ryan Development, which operates Next Generation Children's Centers in nine communities in Massachusetts. Kelleher Construction will move to a 6-acre site on Sam Fonzo Drive that it purchased from the city. Kelleher said the company hopes to break ground this fall.

The Kelleher family business started in 1912, when John Kelleher III's grandfather, John Kelleher, began selling blocks of ice cut from Wenham Lake. When the lake was declared the official water supply for Beverly and Salem in the 1950s, Kelleher dredged his own 5-acre pond on Essex Street that now bears his name.

The pond has become a local landmark where people fish and ice skate.

As the ice business waned with the advent of refrigeration, the business expanded into oil and construction. Kelleher said the company now concentrates more on construction management rather than doing the actual building itself, so it no longer needs as much space for trucks and other equipment.

"We're more construction managers today than we are the contractors of old that had an awful lot of equipment and manpower," he said.

The Next Generation Children's Centers operates day care centers in Andover, Franklin, Hopkinton, Marlborough, Natick, Sudbury, Walpole, Westborough and Westford. The company was founded by Donna Kelleher (no relation to the Beverly Kellehers) in 1993 when she could not find a "suitable day care solution" for her first grandchild, according to the company's Web site. Donna Kelleher could not be reached for comment.

Ryan Development is seeking permission from the city's Conservation Commission to build the child care center. Commission chairman David Lang said the company has indicated it also intends to build on land behind the child care center. He said he did not know what kind of development that would be.

Lang said the commission has concerns about the use of an access road near the pond. The commission will take up the matter at its meeting on Tuesday night at City Hall.