Ellis Island the region. The oyster beds remained a major source of food for nearly three centuries. Landfilling to build the railyards of the Lehigh Valley Railroad and the Central Railroad of New Jersey eventually obliterated the oyster beds, engulfed one island, and brought the shoreline much closer to the others. During the colonial period, Little Oyster Island was known as Dyre's, then Bucking Island. In the 1760s, after some pirates were hanged from one of the island's scrubby trees, it became known as Gibbet Island. It was acquired by Samuel Ellis, a colonial New Yorker and merchant possibly from Wales, around
Fowley Island metres to the north east of Fowley Island. The causeway was depicted on a chart of 1848 but was absent in an earlier 1826 map, suggesting that it was constructed between those dates. In the Ordnance Survey map of 1866 it is labelled 'Westwood's Road'. The causeway is believed to have been created to support oyster farming, though the first historical record of this dates from only 1885 when the Fowley Island Oyster Company began. Although the causeway does not reach Fowley Island, and no historical maps show it doing so, it may still have been possible to walk from