Goat Island, a nine-acre island in Milford, was created in 1927 when the Army Corps of Engineers dug a channel that removed the oxbow and straightened the river, improving movement of goods at a time when shipbuilding and agriculture were important local industries. In the late 1800's and early 1900's, six shipyards in Milford produced over 600 wooden ships, but the shipyards closed after the last big white oak tree was felled, and the canneries that served Delmarva farmers also disappeared as trucking replaced river transport for produce. Folklore holds that Goat Island got its name because farmers brought goats there to graze during the summer, and as the city grew, agriculture left the island and it returned to a natural landscape. The City of Milford bought the island in 1975 for $32,000 as a planned terminus for the Mispillion Greenway, and nearly forty years later the Goat Island Nature Trail gave residents and visitors access to the river and its landscape. Milford also contributed to national war production through the Vineyard Shipbuilding Company, founded along East Front Street in 1896 by Milford native Wilson M. Vineyard after engineering work in Chicago and shipbuilding in Wisconsin; his son, Wilson S. "Sonny" Vineyard, joined the company in 1915 after graduating from Drexel. The company built pleasure craft, civilian vessels, and government ships, holding Navy contracts from 1917 to 1944, and became known for fine woodwork in vessels averaging 90 to 115 feet long. During World War I it built subchasers and military tugboats, and after the war it built ten 75-foot Coast Guard patrol boats used against bootlegging, nicknamed "six bitters" for their engines and priced at $24,770 each in late 1924. With World War II, the yard shifted entirely to war production and built 14 wooden subchasers in two classes as part of a vast naval building effort; from 1941 to 1944 its workforce grew to 120 employees working around the clock. These small, swift vessels were called the Navy's "Mighty Mites" and, because they were wooden, sometimes "The Splinter Fleet"; they were rapidly produced to counter German U-boats in the Atlantic, and more than 40,000 sailors served on subchasers during World War II, mostly in coastal waters. One Milford-built vessel, SC 520, served in the Hawaiian Sea Frontier, escorting naval vessels and performing soundings for Japanese submarines around the Hawaiian Islands, and Subchaser 1352, launched in Milford in April 1942, patrolled the Atlantic.