St. Anthony Hall. Photo courtsey of Delta Psi.

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 executions which possibly took place at the site.

The gallows is said to have stood at the corner of Summit and Vernon Streets near where 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 (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.

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) claim that some of those convicted were executed at Gallows Hill where Trinity College now stands. This 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. ¹⁾

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.

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).

Map of pioneer Hartford : founded 1636, incorporated 1784, showing early landmarks and the locations of historical events (1927) by James and Ruth Goldie.

Colonial history of Hartford, Connecticut (1914) by Rev. William DeLoss Love, p. 286.

The Witchcraft Delusion in Colonial Connecticut (1908) by John M. Taylor, p. 100.