Stamford Connecticut — Retro Vintage History

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.

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What's with the Fish Church? Rising over downtown Stamford is a building shaped like a fish — the First Presbyterian Church, designed by the modern architect Wallace Harrison and dedicated in 1958, its sanctuary a hull of folded concrete filled with more than twenty thousand pieces of stained glass and lit like the inside of a sapphire. A 260-foot carillon tower stands beside it. It became a National Historic Landmark in 2021, and it is the most surprising thing on the skyline of a city that has been remaking itself for four centuries — ever since it was a harbor the Siwanoy called Rippowam. This is Stamford, Connecticut, on Long Island Sound.

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.

The settlers came from Wethersfield, upriver on the Connecticut, where a church quarrel had split the town. Under the Reverend Richard Denton they organized themselves as the Rippowam Company in October 1640; Denton’s household arrived in May 1641 and twenty-eight or twenty-nine Puritan families followed that spring, planting a town under the New Haven Colony’s rule. On April 6, 1642, they renamed it Stamford, after the stone market town in Lincolnshire some of them had known. Denton himself did not stay long; within a few years he had moved on to found Hempstead on Long Island. The families stayed, and the town they left behind lived by water for the next two centuries: coasting sloops to New York, cargoes to the West Indies, oysters off the harbor flats, mills on the Rippowam and the Noroton.

The town’s second century was quiet and prosperous in the way of Sound-shore towns. The Boston Post Road ran through it; the Stamford Advocate began printing in 1829 and calls itself the oldest business in the city; a steamboat line to New York opened in the 1820s, and the railroad arrived in the 1840s and never left. In 1820 the parish of Middlesex, on the eastern side, broke away as the town of Darien, and in 1830 the dense center around the harbor incorporated as a borough. Then, in October 1868, a young Philadelphia engineer named Henry R. Towne went into business with a lock inventor named Linus Yale Jr., and chose Stamford for the factory.

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.

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.

The city that replaced the Lock City is the one you see from the train. From the 1960s on, Stamford cleared and rebuilt its downtown and courted the corporations leaving New York, and they came; the skyline of office towers along Washington Boulevard and Tresser Boulevard is a product of that half-century. Metro-North’s New Haven Line makes Stamford station one of the busiest stops between Grand Central and Boston, and a great many people who live here spend their weekdays forty-five minutes west. By the 2020 census Stamford had passed New Haven to become Connecticut’s second-largest city, after Bridgeport, and among the largest in the state by land area. It is also, still, a harbor town: Cove Island, Cummings Park, West Beach and the marinas at Harbor Point face the Sound exactly where Turner’s deed said they would.

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.

Our Stamford design carries an oyster shell beneath an arched STAMFORD and the line Connecticut · Est. 1636, printed in a worn, woodcut style. The oyster is Long Island Sound itself — the shellfish water this harbor town was built beside — and the 1636 date marks Connecticut's colonial founding. It reads like an old harbor-crate stamp: not the commuter-rail Stamford of the timetables, but Rippowam on the Sound, the colonial port under a modern city. This season the emblem shares the collection with the LBD Harbor Witch, drawn for the 1692 trial in a little black dress on a foggy Stamford dock: nobody in 1692 looked like her, because the accused never looked like witches. They looked like the people next door.

Today Stamford is a corporate skyline on a colonial harbor, a commuter city with a 1640 deed in its files and a witch trial it can finally be proud of. People come for the parade balloons in November, the beaches and the boardwalk in July, the Fish Church any Sunday, and the view of the light from Shippan Point. Our Stamford, Connecticut designs gather that identity into wearable form — the oyster, the harbor, the colonial port, and this season the Harbor Witch who never was. Stamford, CT — Rippowam on the Sound, a harbor town since 1641.

Stamford, CT — Travel Guide

Visiting Stamford, CT Today

Stamford pairs a working Long Island Sound harbor with a lively downtown, shoreline parks, and river greenways. Visitors come for the harbor and beaches, colonial and maritime history, the famous Fish Church, and an easy train ride up the Sound from New York. Summer is beach season at Cove Island, Cummings Park and West Beach, when non-resident passes apply; the Sunday before Thanksgiving brings the downtown balloon parade; and the Harbor Point boardwalk and the Mianus River trails are good in any month.

Harbor, Parks & Heritage

For visitors planning things to do in Stamford, CT:

• See the Fish Church (First Presbyterian) — a fish-shaped National Historic Landmark of modern architecture.
• Walk Cove Island Park along Long Island Sound, with beaches, bird sanctuary, and bike paths.
• Stroll Mill River Park downtown, on the Rippowam River with bridges and lawns.
• Explore the Bartlett Arboretum and the Stamford Museum & Nature Center.
• Follow the Harbor Point boardwalk past the marinas and out toward Shippan Point.
• Look for the Stamford Harbor Ledge Light from Cummings Beach or Shippan Point — the 1882 sparkplug tower on Chatham Rock is privately owned and cannot be visited, but it is the harbor’s landmark from shore.
• Walk the South End, where the Yale & Towne lock works stood from 1868 to 1959 and gave Stamford its Lock City name.
• Hike Mianus River Park on the Greenwich line, and come the Sunday before Thanksgiving for the downtown balloon parade.

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.

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Kindred Cities

Greetings to visitors from Sparta, Greece (καλώς ήρθατε), Jiangdu, China (欢迎) and Settefrati, Italy (benvenuti), Stamford’s sister cities.

Three very different places share Stamford’s habit of outlasting its own names. Sparta has been a byword for three thousand years and is today a quiet market town under Taygetus; Jiangdu is a canal and river district of Yangzhou on the Yangtze, a working waterfront older than any English deed; and Settefrati is a hill village in the Comino Valley of Lazio whose families came to Stamford in numbers a century ago and never quite left either place.

Stamford rewards the visitor who likes a city with a shoreline: a beach in the morning, a church shaped like a fish by lunch, the train to New York if the evening calls. Come and visit us soon.

Planning a visit starts with the Stamford Downtown Special Services District and the Connecticut Office of Tourism.

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For deeper reading on the Stamford, Connecticut history described here — the Siwanoy settlement of Rippowam, the July 1, 1640 deed, the 1641 Wethersfield founding under Richard Denton and the 1642 renaming, the 1692 witch trial of Elizabeth Clawson and Mercy Disborough, the 1820 separation of Darien, the 1868 founding of Yale & Towne and the Lock City era, the 1882 Stamford Harbor Ledge Light, the 1949 consolidation and the 1958 Fish Church — useful contacts include (1) the Stamford Historical Society, (2) the Ferguson Library local-history collection, (3) the Connecticut State Library and State Archives, (4) the Stamford Town & City Clerk’s records office, (5) the Stamford Historic Neighborhood Preservation Program, and (6) Richard Godbeer, Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692 (Oxford University Press, 2005), the standard account of the trial. For travel information, useful contacts include (1) the Stamford Downtown Special Services District, (2) Visit Fairfield County CT, (3) the City of Stamford parks and recreation office, (4) the Connecticut State Parks office, and (5) the Stamford Transportation Center (Metro-North/Amtrak) information desk.