Horse Island (Connecticut)

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For other places with the same name, see Horse Island.

Horse Island, at 17 acres (69,000 m²), is one of the largest of the Thimble Islands off Stony Creek, a section of Branford, Connecticut. It is owned by Yale University and is maintained as an ecological laboratory by Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History. It was purchased and donated to the university in 1972 as a convenient addition to the Yale Coastal Field Station in nearby Guilford, which has its own dock and boats. Since then, however, the main thrust of biological research at Yale and elsewhere has turned intensively in the direction of molecular biology, and there is less active research conducted on the island.

The island possesses a large house, which has been kept in good repair and can serve as a base for experimenters or others remaining on the island for overnight stays or longer.

The origins of the island's name are not definitely known; it is assumed that at some point when a lot of shipping passed the island on the way to the harbor, a cargo of horses may have found its way to the island from a capsized or wrecked ship, but at present no physical or documentary traces of any such event exist.

[edit] References

Wealthy Widow Buying Up Thimbles, "New Haven Register", January 22, 2006, page A1
Half a Mile Off the Coast; Stacey Stowe; "In the Region/Connecticut", New York Times, July 30, 2006; Real Estate page 10.