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.
Who were the Stamford witches? Elizabeth Clawson and Mercy Disborough, two neighbors accused in 1692 after a servant girl’s fits; Stamford tried them, and hanged no one. That spring, while Salem was filling its jail, a seventeen-year-old servant named Katherine Branch began to convulse in the house of Daniel Wescot and to name the women who tormented her. One was Goodwife Clawson of Stamford, a woman who had quarreled with the Wescots for years. The other was Mercy Disborough from Compo, down the Sound. Both were jailed, searched for witch-marks and bound and lowered into the water to see whether they floated. Then Stamford did something Salem never managed: seventy-six of Clawson’s neighbors signed a petition swearing she was no witch. The court at Fairfield heard the case in September and acquitted her in October. Disborough was convicted, and reprieved. The witches went away. The need didn’t.
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.
