The islands carry the town's best story. By long local legend, the privateer Captain William Kidd hid gold among the Thimbles before his capture in 1701 — names like Money Island and Kidd's Cove still nod to the tale, though no treasure has ever turned up. Most of the islets are private homes now, their cottages perched on bare pink rock, and the best way to see them is from one of the tour boats that thread out of Stony Creek harbor on a summer afternoon.
For two centuries Branford lived off the shoreline. Colonists farmed, built wharves and mills, and worked the oyster beds of the Sound; oystering, more than anything, built the early town. When the railroad arrived in 1852 it brought industry — the Branford Lock Works, the Malleable Iron Fittings Company, Atlantic Wire — and it set off the granite boom at Stony Creek, whose quarries opened in the 1840s and peaked in the 1880s. Branford oysters were shipped up and down the coast in those years, and a web of small railroads and granite wharves ran right out to the water's edge to load the cut stone onto barges bound for the harbors of New York.
Why People Visit Branford
Branford blends village greens with island-dotted coves. Visitors mix easy boat rides with libraries, beaches, and shoreline paths, all on Long Island Sound. It is peaceful, nautical, and neighborly, with year-round appeal in its parks, paths, and public spaces. Colonial shoreline history and everyday Connecticut life sit side by side here in a welcoming way, from the Town Green to the granite docks at Stony Creek.
