Tory Den

Local legends at Tory Den describe ghostly whispers and shadowy figures among the rocks. During the Revolutionary War, Loyalist colonist Stephen Graves and a group of fellow Tories used this rock shelter in the woods off the Tunxis Trail as a hideout from the Sons of Liberty, who never found it; Graves's wife would signal the group with a conch shell when it was safe to come home. About a century later, the same shelter became one of the regular stops of Connecticut's famous wandering vagabond, the Old Leatherman, on his repeating 365-mile circuit through the region in the 1880s.