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.
Stamford Harbor Ledge Light, a 60-foot cast-iron sparkplug tower on Chatham Rock, was built in 1882, automated in 1953, and sold into private hands in 1955.
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.
