Yale died that December, weeks after the papers were signed, and Towne reorganized the firm as Yale & Towne Manufacturing. The pin-tumbler cylinder lock Yale had perfected, the one with the small flat key that still opens most of the doors in America, was made in Stamford’s South End for the better part of ninety years. The works grew into the largest employer in town, more than 3,000 people after the Second World War, and the city grew around them: Lock City, people called it, with the works whistle setting the hours. Stamford incorporated as a city in 1893, ran town and city governments side by side for fifty-six years, and finally consolidated into one city on April 15, 1949. Yale & Towne began cutting its Stamford workforce in 1948 and closed the plant in 1959. The brick sheds stood on for decades; the neighborhood around them is now Harbor Point.
Which brings the story back to 1692, because the witch trial is the piece of Stamford’s past the town has only recently decided to own. For three centuries it sat in the records as an embarrassment, a footnote to Salem. The historian Richard Godbeer rebuilt the case from the court papers in Escaping Salem and found something more useful than a scandal: a community that was asked to hang two women on the testimony of a servant girl’s fits, and refused. Connecticut had hanged accused witches before: Alse Young at Hartford in 1647 was the first in the colonies, Goodwife Knapp was hanged at Fairfield in 1653, and the Hartford witch panic of 1662 and 1663 sent several more to the gallows; Winifred Benham’s acquittal at Wallingford in 1697 closed the colony’s last trial. In 2023 the state legislature formally exonerated them all. Stamford did not need the resolution. It had done the work in 1692, with a petition and a jury.
Why People Visit Stamford, CT
Stamford balances harbor and city — sailboats on the Sound, a downtown skyline, and four centuries of history from Rippowam to the rail line. It is a Gold Coast harbor town an hour from Manhattan, with the water, the parks, and that one-of-a-kind church on the hill. Increasingly it is also a town with a story to tell: the one that was asked to hang its witches in 1692 and signed a petition instead.
