In 1917, the Crane family bought the first piece of Choate Island; decades later, the island entered the Crane Wildlife Refuge under the Trustees in 1974

For centuries, the island supported Indigenous communities, farms, livestock and family homes before becoming a wildlife refuge on the Massachusetts coast. Choate Island, once known as Hog Island, is now the largest island in the Crane Wildlife Refuge, where salt marsh, grassland and forest frame historic buildings that date back more than two centuries. Its transformation was gradual, beginning with the Crane family's early-20th-century land purchases and ending with Miné Crane's 1974 gift to The Trustees of Reservations.

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