Gallows Hill
Gallows Hill is a name for the northern end of “Rocky Ridge,” the summit of “Rocky Hill” on which the present Trinity College campus is built. The name “Gallows Hill” refers to public executions reportedly carried out at the site during the time of the Revolutionary War. The gallows is said to have stood at the corner of Summit and Vernon Streets near where St. Anthony Hall now stands.
According to the Trinity College Bulletin (volume xxxvi, number 2, April, 1938):
It seems certain that at least four men were hung on Gallows Hill at the head of Zachary's Lane [now Vernon Street]: Moses Dunbar for high treason in 1777, David Farnsworth and John Blair in 1778 as spies and counterfeiters, and Alexander McDowell in 1781 as a deserter from the army.
A number of accounts of the Connecticut Witch Trials of the 17th century (nearly 50 years before the Salem Witch Trials) claim that some of those convicted were executed at Gallows Hill where Trinity College now stands. However, the 1938-39 Bulletin notes that the location of the gallows used for these executions was described as “on the road from the Cow Pasture into the Country,” and concludes that this is a location “over the town line in West Hartford near Albany Avenue, perhaps on the hill where the house of James G. Butler now stands.” The Bulletin also notes that attendance at public executions was encouraged at the time, in the belief that it would be “of moral value to young and old.” Since Zachery's Lane (Vernon Street) did not yet exist at the time of the Witch Trials, the Bulletin notes, the Gallows Hill at Trinity was probably not sufficiently accessible for an event which the public was encouraged to attend in large numbers, and so would not have been chosen.
The Gallows Hill Bookstore, which opened in 1991 in Hallden Hall, took its name from this area of campus.
Sources
The Hartford Courant “Envisioning Witches On Trinity's Gallows Hill” (2014) by Cindy Wolfe Boynton.
Trinity College in the Twentieth Century (2000) by Peter and Anne Knapp, p. 4.
Trinity College Bulletin: "History of the Trinity College Campus" (1938-1939).