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What is "Thinking outside the box"? A modern concept adopted by the X generation as their slogan for being creative. So it's a new concept right? Well not necessarily. I would like to tell you about a group of people who thought "outside the box" more than 80 years ago when they founded a firehouse and found themselves the proud owners of a herd of wild ponies The Ponies of Chincoteague.

Have you heard of Chincoteague? Do you know where Chincoteague is? Have you read the children's stories about Misty of Chincoteague? Have you been to Chincoteague?

Chincoteague is a small island approximately 7 miles long by 1 mile wide and it lays between the Virginia coastline to the East and the larger barrier island of Assateague to the West. Assateague Island actually spans the border between Maryland and Virginia and is divided between the 2 states. The northern part of the island, the Maryland part is known as the Assateague National Park and is managed by the Bureau of Land Management. The Southern part of the Island, the Virginian part, is the Chincoteague National Seashore. The name Chincoteague is Native American and it means "beautiful land across the water" and it is home to a small herd of very hardy, very resourceful, wild ponies.

Just how the ponies got there in the first place depends on which account you read (and there are many) I particularly like the one that says a Spanish Galleon was wrecked in a storm off the coast and the ponies which were being transported in the hold managed to escape from the sinking ship and swam their way ashore that one has a pretty romantic style to it don't you think?

Another, more down to earth story says that the horses arrived in the 17th century when a tax was imposed on livestock and free roaming animals were forbidden. This required the livestock owners to account for all their animals for the tax to be levied and then to fence in all their lands and confine their animals. This would have been very expensive for the settlers and, as the story goes, the local people just took their animals over to Assateague and let them loose until the tax assessor left; nobody owned them so nobody was accountable. Some of the horses decided they quite liked this way of life and so somehow managed to avoid the round up when the owners came back for them and so the herd was born. So if you believe that story they were put there as a tax dodge! Doesn't have quite same appeal does it?

Then there is yet another story that says they were abandoned

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