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.
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.
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.
