Stamford Connecticut Vintage Retro Unisex Cotton Jersey Tank Top - Black Logo

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.

Two landmarks from either end of that story still stand on the water and on the skyline. Out past the breakwater, on Chatham Rock, the Stamford Harbor Ledge Light is a sixty-foot cast-iron sparkplug tower set on a caisson in 1882, the kind of lighthouse that looks like it was screwed into the Sound. It was automated in 1953, sold to a private owner in 1955, and has been privately held ever since, which is why you can see it from Cummings Beach and Shippan Point but not climb it. In town, the First Presbyterian Church on Bedford Street is Wallace K. Harrison’s Fish Church: a sanctuary shaped like a fish in plan and profile, its concrete walls set with more than 20,000 pieces of faceted glass, dedicated in 1958, with a 260-foot carillon tower beside it. It was named a National Historic Landmark on January 13, 2021.

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.