Trinity's own churchyard, older than the current 1846 building by a century and a half, holds figures whose graves draw more visitors today than the sanctuary above them. Alexander Hamilton, killed in his 1804 duel with Aaron Burr, is buried there beneath a white stone pyramid he shares with his wife Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, a monument that has become one of Lower Manhattan's most visited historic sites in its own right, its renewed popularity tied directly to the twenty first century musical that carried his name back into wide public awareness.
Hamilton is not the churchyard's only figure of national consequence. Robert Fulton, the engineer whose steamboat design transformed American commercial transport, is buried nearby, as is Albert Gallatin, the fourth United States Treasury Secretary, and Angelica Schuyler Church, Elizabeth Hamilton's elder sister and a prominent figure in her own right in the transatlantic social and political circles of the early republic, resting close enough to her sister and brother in law that the family's connections in life are legible in the churchyard's layout in death. Across its full combined burial grounds, Trinity's cemeteries hold roughly one hundred twenty thousand people accumulated over more than three centuries of continuous use.
That density of early American history sits directly beneath the same steeple that once stood as the tallest structure in New York City, a churchyard that functions today as much as a walked tour of the early republic's founding generation as it does a working cemetery, its headstones considerably older than the Gothic Revival church that has watched over them since 1846.