Horse Island (Connecticut)


Horse Island, at 17 acres, is 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 1971 as a convenient addition to the Yale Coastal Field Station in nearby Guilford, which has its own dock and boats, and is also managed by Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History..
A large house on the island 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 known. Some say that at some point a cargo of horses may have found its way to the island from a capsized or wrecked ship, but no physical or documentary traces of such an event exist. Others speculate that the island's horseshoe shape may have influenced its name. For many years it was owned by an executive of Standard Oil named Clark, and was called "Clark's Island" by everyone. When James and Esther Rettger purchased the island in 1946 they restored the original name as found on the geodetic survey maps.