Encyclopedia Trinitiana

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{{tag>places}}
====== Gallows Hill ======
[{{ :chapter-building-drone-photo_crop.jpg?600|St. Anthony Hall. Photo courtsey of [[https://deltapsi.org/|Delta Psi]].}}]

Gallows Hill is a name for the northern end of "Rocky Ridge," the summit of "Rocky Hill" on which the [[summit_campus|present Trinity College campus]] is built. The name "Gallows Hill" refers to executions which possibly took place at the site. 

The gallows is said to have stood at the corner of Summit and [[vernon_street|Vernon Streets]] near where [[st._anthony_hall|St. Anthony Hall]] now stands. While it is often assumed that the executions were of accused witches during the Hartford Witch Trials (1643-1667), it is more likely that the hangings were of British loyalists, according to the Trinity College //[[bulletin|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.//

===== Connecticut Witch Trials (1647-1663) =====

[{{:iiif-service_gmd_gmd378_g3784_g3784h_ct002239-full-pct_25-0-default.jpg?400 |[[https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3784h.ct002239/?r=-0.044,-0.065,1.111,0.927,0|Map of Pioneer Hartford in 1636 (drawn 1927).]]"Ye Gallows" is visible in the top right corner.}}]

A number of accounts of the Connecticut Witch Trials of the 17th century (nearly 50 years before the Salem Witch Trials and 200 years before the founding of [[washington_college|Washington College]]) claim that some of those convicted were executed at Gallows Hill where Trinity College now stands. This belief may be due to a passage in a 1908 book by John M. Taylor which states: 

//The Greensmiths were convicted and sentenced to suffer death. In January, 1662, they were hung on "Gallows Hill," on the bluff a little north of where Trinity College now stands—"a logical location" one most learned in the traditions and history of Hartford calls it—as it afforded an excellent view of the execution to a large crowd on the meadows to the west, a hanging being then a popular spectacle and entertainment.//((The Witchcraft Delusion, p. 100))

However, in 1914 William DeLoss Love wrote: 

//It seems probable that the witches were executed outside of the town-plot, on the road from the Cow Pasture into the Country. There the gallows of early times was located. On March 10, 1711-12, John Read sold to John Olcott a tract of about seven acres, bounded south on the "highway leading out of Hartford town towards Symsbury," now Albany Avenue. It is described in the deed as "near the house lately built by Joseph Butler, near where the Gallows used to stand." The place is near enough identified as on the north side of the avenue, on the east end of the present Goodwin lot. There, a large elm tree on a rise of ground might well memorialize the place where this tragedy of Hartford's early history was enacted.//((The Colonial History of Hartford, p. 286)) 

The 1938-39 //Trinity College Bulletin,// possibly drawing from Love's account, also 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." 

Of the two competing locations, it is unlikely that [[summit_campus|Rocky Ridge]] (the present Trinity campus) was chosen for executions which 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, rendering the area inaccessible. In contrast, the Albany Ave site was flat, open, and close to the town common. 

The [[gallows_hill_bookstore|Gallows Hill Bookstore]], which opened in 1991 in [[hallden_hall|Hallden Hall]], took its name from this area of campus.

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===== Sources =====

Before Salem: Witch Hunting in the Connecticut River Valley, 1647-1663 (2017) by Richard S. Ross III, p. 260.

[[https://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-xpm-2014-04-25-hc-trinity-gallows-hills-20140425-story.html|The Hartford Courant]] "Envisioning Witches On Trinity's Gallows Hill" (2014) by Cindy Wolfe Boynton.

[[https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/w_books/2/|Trinity College in the Twentieth Century]] (2000) by Peter and Anne Knapp, p. 4.

[[https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.38786973|Trinity College Bulletin: The History of the Trinity Campus]], April 1939.

[[https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3784h.ct002239/?r=-0.044,-0.065,1.111,0.927,0|Map of pioneer Hartford : founded 1636, incorporated 1784, showing early landmarks and the locations of historical events]] (1927) by James and Ruth Goldie.

[[https://archive.org/details/colonialhistoryo00hart/page/286/mode/2up|Colonial history of Hartford, Connecticut]] (1914) by Rev. William DeLoss Love, p. 286.

[[https://www.gutenberg.org/files/12288/12288-h/12288-h.htm|The Witchcraft Delusion in Colonial Connecticut]] (1908) by John M. Taylor, p. 100. 


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