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.
Before any of that, the harbor at the mouth of the Rippowam was Siwanoy country, and Rippowam was its name. On July 1, 1640, Captain Nathaniel Turner of the New Haven Colony signed a deed for the land with the Siwanoy sagamores Ponus and Wascussee, paying in coats, hoes, hatchets, mirrors, knives, two kettles and four fathoms of white wampum. Whatever each side believed it had agreed to, the price tells you how the English valued the place: as farmland by a navigable river, within sight of the Sound. The name Rippowam survives in the river that still runs through downtown to the harbor, and in this page’s habit of saying it first.
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.
