More From Stamford Connecticut
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Stamford Connecticut Vintage Retro Unisex Cotton Jersey Tank Top - Black Logo
Regular price $28.00 USDRegular price -
Stamford Connecticut Vintage Retro Unisex Heavy Crewneck Sweatshirt - Black Logo
Regular price $44.00 USDRegular price -
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Stamford Connecticut Holiday Ornament - The LBD Harbor Witch
Regular price $28.00 USDRegular price
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.
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.
