More From Stamford Connecticut
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Stamford Connecticut Holiday Ornament - The LBD Harbor Witch
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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.
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.
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.
