Stamford Connecticut Vintage Retro Womens Fitted Ringspun Cotton Tee - White Logo

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.

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.