by David Rompf
Emerging one morning from a subway station in Lower Manhattan, I waded through the bustle of traffic, sidewalk vendors, and flocks of tourists meandering toward Wall Street, and soon I found myself in Trinity Churchyard, an oasis surrounded by seemingly indestructible symbols of money and power, its iron-gated tranquility braced against the clank and clatter of commerce. Not far from here, massive Corinthian columns stood guard at the New York Stock Exchange, while farther down on Broadway, the bronze Charging Bull, emblem of American resilience and economic prowess, held the steady pose of the perennial Instagram star it has become. Inside the churchyard, as I stood on a winding path, a stream of visitors resolute in their aim hurried past me, heading without pause to the marble temple at Alexander Hamilton’s gravesite. But I did not fall in line with them, for on this spring day, pink and white magnolias in lush abundance, I lingered at the headstone of the little-known Richard Churcher.
What brought me to Trinity Churchyard? For one day in New York, I sought a reprieve from the city’s perpetual trembling restlessness. I also wanted a break from the self I habitually cultivated as a writer, restless in his own ways, while imperfectly cloistered in my midtown apartment, steps away from Times Square. Central Park, clogged with bike riders, strollers, and runners, did not fit the day’s bill. There is a certain frenetic frame of mind to which a cemetery is, as Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, “If not an antidote, at least an alleviation.” I went to the churchyard to seek its ancient, changeless quietude, and as soon as I entered its grounds, the din and the crowds and the cold concrete fortresses of finance all seemed to fall away, as did the anxious shell of myself. The alleviation was not gradual; it was instant.
What is it about an urban cemetery that provides a fast-acting relief to the pressures and pathologies of a city like New York? Perhaps a suburban or rural cemetery’s tranquility is less surprising and less immediately impactful on visitors’ states of mind, the borders between leafy outskirts, expansive farmland, or rolling forested hills and cemeteries being fuzzier, with terrains on either side reflecting portions of one another. The boundary between Trinity Churchyard and the rest of New York seemed to fend off urban bluster, and a certain braggadocio retreated into downtown’s narrow lanes and alleyways. A wave of soothing calmness came over me in the cemetery, where I soon discovered the resting place of a boy who lived in Manhattan long before its core radiated kaleidoscopic light visible from space.
Who was he? Richard Churcher, youngest person buried in this cemetery, born March 1676, fifty years after Peter Minuit and the Lenape completed history’s most fabled real estate transaction. Died April 1681, sixteen years before Trinity Church was incorporated, and more than three centuries before 2,600 people, in a single morning, a single hour, joined his final sleep a few blocks away. Every death, like every life, has context, and often only a headstone can tell us something about both. Richard Churcher’s is eighteen inches tall, the oldest in the yard and the oldest carved grave-marker in all of New York City. Youngest buried, oldest headstone: it is a fact that creates, for me, a strange cognitive glitch, an unsettling lapse when a simple math problem seems unsolvable. The words are cut crudely into his headstone, with letters crammed together, many rendered indecipherable by time and nature, unyielding even for the dead. The inscription seems a code, though not one most people would try to crack. Visitors to Trinity Churchyard come not to ponder the enigma of a Richard Churcher, to solve the puzzle of his life and death, but to commune with the near-mythic aura of Alexander Hamilton, perhaps because of the history they’ve studied, or, more likely, because they’ve seen the Broadway musical, whose final song refers to the statesman’s grave before asking, in its last words, “When you’re gone, who remembers your name? Who keeps your flame? Who tells your story?”
Alone before the boy’s grave, I struggled to make out that he was the son of William, but his father—and his mother, for she is not mentioned—remain, like their child, a mystery; as far as I could tell, they are not buried anywhere in the churchyard. The other side of the headstone is carved with a memento mori for our fleeting existence: a winged hourglass—the literal depiction of tempus fugit: time flies—above a skull-and-crossbones.
What did I want to know about Richard Churcher? The culprit that took him. Was it scarlet fever, diphtheria, smallpox? All are possibilities. In the seventeenth century, even a chest cold could have done it. Or kicked by a horse, struck by a carriage or by lightning, slipped near the harbor, caught in a turbulent swirl. The truth will never be known, yet I craved knowing because Richard Churcher lived for only five years. Gone before his time, taken before he could be fully educated, before anyone could watch him grow up, love flooding his chest or breaking his heart. In the stillness of this refuge, I grieved for sweet life cut oh so short.
Next to Richard, inches away, lies Anne Churcher, died 1691, age seventeen, probably a relative and possibly a sister, but since her father isn’t mentioned—and why is that—we’ll never know. Churchers in the Churchyard: I like the poetic irony despite the dearth of information about this boy and this girl.
Epitaphs are the briefest biographies, minimalist memoirs inferred from sentence fragments, truncated facts, cliffhanger headlines, and perhaps—space and money permitting—a warm and flattering appositive. Devoted mother, distinguished judge, courageous officer. Among the most sorrowful: Unknown Soldier, Baby Boy, Baby Girl. Born, son, died—those words were readable on Richard Churcher’s headstone, a poignant and achingly concise sequence. Trinity Church lost all its earliest records in a fire, so I will never know more about him, just as we will never know the exact price paid for Mannahatta, as the Lenape called their hilly wooded isle, because no deed exists for the sale. The payment might have included sixty guilders worth of trading items: knives, axes, cloth, and other sundry trinkets, but probably not a pouchful of beads alone, as folklore asks us to believe, or as we want to believe because that version of the story would be, somehow, more appalling. The exchange probably occurred on Manhattan’s southern tip, a few hundred feet down from Charging Bull, near the Custom House, the most plausible locus because of its convenience to Dutch settlements. Or eager hands might have been shaken on the northernmost point, amid a small virgin forest where, on a visit soon after my own arrival in New York, I saw the commemorative plaque that concedes, in three words, an unmistakable whiff of fiction: according to legend.
In Trinity Churchyard’s south yard—Richard Churcher’s grave is in the north—I came upon the white pyramid crowning Alexander Hamilton’s Federal temple. I did not find it by happenstance. From the north yard, the monolith crests above the stream of people pooled around it, five deep, phone cameras deployed. The pithy epitaph for the Founding Father, died July 12th, 1804, a day after his duel with Aaron Burr, tells us that he was, “The PATRIOT of incorruptible INTEGRITY. The SOLDIER of approved VALOUR. The STATESMEN of consummate WISDOM whose TALENTS and VIRTUES will be admired by Grateful Posterity. Long after this MARBLE shall have mouldered into DUST.” No truer words have adorned a shrine, for Alexander Hamilton has been raised from his marble-clad netherworld at least twice, initially on September 17th, 1917 in a play called Hamilton written by Mary Hamlin and George Arliss and performed at the Knickerbocker Theater, the first Broadway venue to introduce moving electrical marquees, thereby giving birth to the Great White Way and the voluminous glow viewable from low-Earth orbit. Alexander was resurrected a second time on February 17th, 2015, when Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical, Hamilton, premiered at the Public Theater in the East Village before transferring to the Richard Rogers Theater in Midtown, becoming its longest-running show. Miranda’s rap-infused choreography of Broadway-washed facts continues to send pilgrims marching to pay homage to the revolutionary hero in Trinity Churchyard.
On the day of my visit, a cluster of high school students stood gazing at Hamilton’s monument when one of them asked, “So where is Aaron Burr buried?” Pointing to the north yard, his friend began to answer, “Over there, I think…” But a bystander, an indignant Hamilton connoisseur, brusquely interrupted, “Burr’s not here, and he’s nowhere to be found in New York. He’s buried in Princeton, New Jersey.”
“Oh,” the deflated teenager said.
I wanted to tell them about Richard Churcher’s headstone, so modest and yet profound. I was even inclined to suggest they pay a visit. They would appreciate—wouldn’t they—the message of the winged hourglass and crossbones in relation to their own passing youth? But I began to feel protective of Richard Churcher and his tiny plot of grass, his tiny span of life. I felt protective of his vulnerability to whatever force had swept him from this world. Would they have cared about a boy without an outsized history? A boy without a ballad to his name? Alexander Hamilton’s temple and Manuel’s creation are hard acts to follow. In 2016, a Trinity Church archivist told a reporter, “Hamilton is having a moment.” She was talking about the man, his burial site, and of course the show on Forty-Sixth Street. It has been a long moment indeed, a durable and gripping reign.
As I strolled in the realm of the unsung lad and the immortal rockstar, luminaries abounded. Robert Fulton, inventor of the first commercially viable steamboat. Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, wife of Alexander, daughter of a Revolutionary War general, friend of Martha Washington, and allegedly a tomboy as a child. Albert Gallatin, Treasury Secretary under Thomas Jefferson and founder of New York University. John Peter Zenger, the newspaper publisher whose trial for libel, in which his lawyers successfully argued truth as a defense, helped codify the right to a free press. In its first iteration—there have been three—Trinity Church itself stood solidly in the pantheon. A bronze tablet informs visitors that on July 17th, 1754, the first class of King’s College, which was to become Columbia University, met in the church’s schoolhouse. Wandering in the yard, I was struck by this karmic evolution: a church and its cemetery morphing into a hub for beginnings, for youth and for study—an epicenter, that is, for the birth of futures, not solely an entombment but an embodiment of the tender and clamorous circle of life.
In the north yard, a short walk from Richard Churcher’s headstone, a sandstone slab set flat on the ground is engraved with the name of Charlotte Temple. No dates of birth or death are indicated. From early nineteenth-century press reports, we know that Charlotte Temple was celebrated in plays and in touring exhibitions of wax figures, and New York newspapers published detailed accounts of grief-stricken fans weeping over her grave. But the plot thickens with this head-scratcher: Charlotte Temple lived and died only as a fictional character, the protagonist in a bestselling novel, Charlotte Temple, A Tale of Truth, written by British-American author Susanna Rowson and published in the United States in 1794. The unhappy story, in short: an English schoolgirl is courted and whisked away to America by an amorous British officer who dumps her when she becomes pregnant, leaving her to a life of disgraced poverty. No one knows when, how, or why Charlotte’s name became etched into the slab. Or who did it, although anecdotal evidence suggests that a stonecutter—and closeted literary funnyman—pulled the prank when Trinity Church was being rebuilt for the third time. Intriguing but unfounded gossip? Reasonable speculation? The choir chants once again: we’ll never know. In 2008, The New York Times covered a highly anticipated event: the slab bearing Charlotte Temple’s name was hoisted up to confirm whether a vault lay beneath it and, if so, what clues might have been chiseled into its surface. No vault was found, but Charlotte lives on, breathing and suffering in the documented imagination of her creator who, in her novel’s prescient introduction, hands us this paradox: “The principal characters in this little tale are now consigned to the silent tomb.” Silent, empty, and wildly more popular than Richard Churcher’s gravesite, though not as popular as Alexander Hamilton’s.
Uptown, in the Trinity Cemetery and Mausoleum, sister to the downtown Trinity, among the tree-lined streets of Hamilton Heights—named after none other than Alexander—the list of notables expands. There lie several members of the Astor family, including John Jacob Astor IV, whose grandfather founded the first American monopoly, the American Fur Company, and further enriched his fortunes by bringing opium into China and England, and by stockpiling shrewd investments in New York real estate. Grandson Astor perished on the Titanic after ensuring his pregnant wife was safe in a lifeboat. America’s richest man at the time, perhaps the richest in the world, Astor was recovered seven days after the majestic ship sank into icy oblivion, his body identified by the initials sewn into his shirt collar. Madeleine Astor would join her husband in the uptown cemetery twenty-eight years later, and exactly one hundred years later, in April 2012, their great-grandson, Gregory Todd Astor, portrayed John Jacob IV in Titanic: The Musical, staged in Burlington, Vermont. Theater, like cemeteries, can invoke its own eternity. Who else? Here lies John James Audubon with two dozen carved birds on the monument towering above him. And Ralph Ellison, Edward Koch, and Eliza Jumel, the estranged second wife of disgraced Aaron Burr. Not to be forgotten, Rita Hernandez de Alba de Acosta Stokes Lydig, a socialite born in 1875 in New York to Spanish parents of aristocratic pedigree, died 1929. Her name alone is longer than most epitaphs. Photographed by Edward Steichen and painted by John Singer Sargent, Rita was once declared the most picturesque woman in America. Her sister Mercedes, buried nearby, declined to hide her sexuality and pursued big-name affairs with, among others, Isadora Duncan, Marlene Dietrich, Tallulah Bankhead, and most prominently, Greta Garbo.
Politicians, fallen soldiers, artists, writers, those born into wealth and power and entitlement, others who began with nothing and attained everything through skill, savvy, hard work, craftiness and cunning or astounding good luck, movers and shakers of every stripe: perhaps more than any other public space in New York, cemeteries consecrate the city’s illustrious catalysts of culture and business, of unrelenting progress, and proclaim righteous stakes in American exceptionalism. If a city can project a scrupulously crafted image of itself—a mythos finely honed by tourism offices and cascaded through advertising and PR engines, a mythos breezily perpetuated by its own citizens— what do New York’s cemeteries want us to know about the city and its past? What do they want us to remember, and what can be remembered when so much psychic energy gets shoveled into constructing and renovating and beautifying for the future? Most of all, I think the cemeteries, like the entirety of the city, desire to project the popular, glitzy, tourist-friendly history—the lore we seek when our feet hit the pavement running, when we are looking up, up, up for it, the gleaming, flickering thrill of our dreams, the metropolis of the movies. This willful history lionizes members of New York’s extended royal families, reveres their influence or notoriety, their courage and bravery and conniving, their money and their gorgeousness and the sheer fluke of their birth, glorifies them in the streets and buildings that carry their names—Astor Place, Rockefeller Center, Vanderbilt Hall.
New York City, and particularly Manhattan, is America’s Valley of the Kings, the confluence of the Hudson and East River our Nile, with sunrise and sunset cruises circling the entombed. The vulture atop Audubon’s tower of birds is the goddess Nekhbet, protector of Upper Egypt. A few years ago, during my voyage on the Circle Line around Manhattan, the captain slowed his vessel near the northern end of Riverside Park. Over the PA system he announced, “There’s Grant’s tomb!” and directed our attention to a grand Neoclassical cupola rising above the tree line, the lofty peak of the largest mausoleum in North America. “You know who’s buried there, right?” the captain said, joking and yet not. A few tourists seemed as confused as the high school boy who assumed Aaron Burr had secured a place in Trinity Churchyard. “Who else but Grant?” I heard a fellow voyager ask, nonchalantly.
His wife, Julia, of course.
New York’s cemeteries can also expose the city’s cliques, shining a Klieg light on its claustrophobic spheres of social inbreeding and conjuring up mirages of an afterlife cocktail party for high society. It is a small world, Kurt Vonnegut wrote, when you put it in a cemetery. A small world, yes, and often a morally shifty one, as I discovered. New York’s famous cemeteries—its cemeteries for the famous—have often overshadowed dark truths about my beloved hometown, truths uncovered in burial grounds where history itself has been obscured by earthen layers bulldozed for buildings and parks, by the digging and the landscaping of the endless invention of the city.
In 1626, fifty years before Richard Churcher’s birth, and the very year Peter Minuit scored his freehold, eleven captive slaves from Angola, the Congo, and Sao Tome arrived on a Dutch West Indies Company ship in New Amsterdam Harbor, the first of thousands of enslaved people brought to New York. From 1711 to 1762, two streets away from the current New York Stock Exchange, Africans were bought and sold in an open-air market. Once purchased, they worked for eminent families and for the 18th-century developers who constructed the burgeoning city’s infrastructure. Enslaved Africans were among the laborers who built the ten-foot-high wooden plank palisade running east to west in Lower Manhattan, to protect against pirates, the British, and Native Americans—the wall that gave Wall Street its name. I walked to 100 Wall Street, between Water Street and Front Street near the East River, to see the plaque installed in 2015 to commemorate the site of the New York Municipal Slave Market. From that plaque, I learned this: enslaved Africans helped build the first Trinity Church. Though not shocked by this revelation, I was bewildered by the omission of the fact from the church’s official website, which lavishly extolls Trinity’s ties to Alexander Hamilton, pop icon in life and in death: “In his private life, Hamilton was an active and vital part of the Trinity community. He even rented a pew in the church, although his wife Eliza and the children attended worship more regularly than he did.” I was equally perplexed by the gushing attention heaped on a fictional character’s gravesite while real people who raised the steeple for Trinity Church have been edited out of its self-told story.
But I should not have been baffled by any of this. Fame, fortune, and power are the buzziest of buzzworthy themes in a city that proudly relishes the narratives of its most storied citizens. The lives of those who facilitated the triumphs of strivers and leaders tend to disappear, time and again, into oblivion, destined to the invisibility of eroded epitaphs. While many have said, in varying words, that cemeteries are full of indispensable people, Ben Franklin’s clever proposition resonated more than any other adage as I explored New York’s graveyards: “Show me your cemeteries and I will show you what kind of people you have.” What kind of people do we have? My own answers leaned binary. Rich and poor, famous and unknown, powerful and powerless, remembered and forgotten. Richard Churcher and Alexander Hamilton. There is much more to New Yorkers, to any people, of course—all the betweenness, the sublime mélange, the unique and unclassifiable marvels. But if I show you the city’s graveyards, the assuring maxim that cemeteries are democratic places—that in death, everyone is equal—collapses under the weight of a less noble truth: in history, the dead have not always been buried democratically.
Where were enslaved and free Africans buried? The African builders of Wall Street, the African servants, the African child laborers?
In Lower Manhattan, I walked up Broadway to the Ted Weiss Federal Building, located just beyond City Hall, not far from the Brooklyn Bridge. The building is named after the congressman who, at age ten, fled the Nazi regime on the last ship out of Hamburg. In 1991, as work began on the thirty-four-story complex, the remains of 419 Africans were found thirty feet below street level. Further archaeological excavation and research suggested that more than 15,000 free and enslaved Africans were buried here on a six-acre site from the 1630s to 1790. It was the largest colonial-era cemetery for Africans, and it is still considered the largest African-American cemetery in the United States. By the turn of the 19th century, the cemetery disappeared from view as land was subdivided, its parcels plowed over and built upon. For nearly two hundred years, it lay hidden deep beneath landfills and the roar of downtown development—a burial site that succumbed to a haphazard second burial. Once exhumed, the remains of the 419 were taken to a biological anthropology lab at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where studies of the bones, teeth, and hair revealed causes of death ranging from malnutrition, infectious diseases, injury, and lead poisoning to overwork. Nearly half of the individuals had been younger than twelve when they died, and more than half of those had not lived past their second birthdays. Younger than Richard Churcher, and never to know his freedom.
Eventually, in 2003, more than ten years after the Ted Weiss Federal Building opened, the bones of the African children and adults were returned to New York, placed in small mahogany coffins made by artists and carpenters in Ghana, and reburied in the Ancestral Re-interment Grove, in an area adjacent to the building, which houses offices for the Internal Revenue Service, the Environmental Protection Agency, and other federal agencies. The site is known as the African Burial Ground National Monument, consisting of an Ancestral Libation Chamber, oriented to the east and open to the sky above, and a Circle of Diaspora, a spiral processional ramp that leads visitors four feet below street level—the original level of burial. On a lawn within the grove, seven mounds mark the underground crypts holding the coffins with the remains.
I walked slowly down the processional ramp, stopping at each inscription on the spiral stone floor.
Burial 75 – Infant stillborn or new born
Burial 99 – Child between six and ten years
Burial 105 – Man between thirty-five and forty-five years
Burial 205 – Woman between eighteen and twenty-one years
Burial 254 – Child between three and a half and five years.
Burials 335 and 336 – Woman between twenty-five and thirty years and a newborn.
It is a solemn, stirring walk on sacred ground, the weighty silence at once a buffer to the civic rattle and a reminder of the once forgotten.
Inside the visitor center, located on the first floor of the federal building, a wall displays 419 photographs of all the remains in situ. Here is New York’s digital counterpart to the vast catacombs and ossuaries of Paris, of Rome and Palermo, of Lima, of Brno, Czechia, and Alexandria, the caverns, tunnels, crypts, and cellars packed and piled with bones, staircases of bones, chandeliers of bones. Standing before the wall, I stepped back to take in the sheer immensity of the forgotten, stepped close again to look at each arrangement of bones, and tried to imagine the flesh-and-blood individuals. They had been buried with care, some with beads from their African homeland, others with coins set upon the eyes. Man, 30-40 years. Infant 0-3 months. Woman 45-55. Man, age unknown. Undetermined. Undetermined. Undetermined. Undetermined, but once a person. I stood before that wall for a very long time, longer than I had lingered at Richard Churcher’s headstone. Charlotte Temple’s grave had always been empty, her sad story a work of fiction, but here the room was full, the history a hard, irrefutable fact.
Across the room, a class of middle school students had gathered. They gently jostled each other for a supply of index cards and pencils to write down their thoughts about the African Burial Ground and slip the cards into a box. I joined them to eavesdrop on their conversations, but they were absolutely quiet as they scribbled, their faces intent, noses to the cards. I had never seen young people so eager to write. I had never seen so many young New Yorkers in a state of hushed and purposeful concentration. They knew the gravity of this place, the sanctity of it.
I had also never seen so many young people reading together with focused intensity, for pinned to the wall in front of them were dozens of index cards penciled with messages from previous visitors.
It’s a beautiful monument to my people. But it’s heavy. I have to take a moment to breathe.
This place makes me feel more connected to my roots. I feel for my ancestors, and love that I get to see the memory of them preserved this way.
Ancestors, thank you for strength and grace.
This almost made me cry.
There is more to history than what is told to us.
We can’t forget about these people.
Those students writing and reading, their youth, the wall of pictured bones, the wall of index cards, eulogy upon eulogy for those beneath the mounds, for everyone else who lay beneath us, the quietude I had sought in an urban cemetery, now compressed and magnified: it was almost too much, too much for a person to absorb in a single day.
We must remember them forever.
And who will remember the twenty-thousand people buried beneath the lively lawns and sidewalks of Washington Square Park, two miles due north of Trinity Church, many of them victims of the yellow fever epidemics that raged through New York between 1797 and 1803?
Who will remember Chief Daniel Nimham of the Stockbridge Militia, a battalion of Mohican, Wappinger, and Munsee tribal members who were the first Native Americans to fight for America’s independence during the Revolutionary War? In the summer of 1778, a loyalist regiment known as the Queen’s Rangers attacked the Stockbridge Militia at their outpost in what is now Van Cortlandt Park in The Bronx. More than forty militia men, including Chief Nimham, were killed, but only seventeen were recovered and buried together in a common grave on a site now called the Stockbridge Indian Burial Ground. In 1906, the Daughters of the American Revolution erected a monument to honor Nimham and his men, a stone cairn headstone affixed with a plaque inscribed, “August 31, 1778. Upon this Field, Chief Nimham and Seventeen Stockbridge Indians, as Allies of the Patriots, Gave their Lives for Liberty.”
Who will remember those interred on Hart Island, afloat off the northeastern shore of the Bronx in Long Island Sound? The mile-long strip is America’s largest public cemetery, with more than a million people buried there, most of them unidentified or unclaimed, many relegated to a potter’s field for the indigent and homeless. There are no headstones to denote the slightest threads of their stories. Across 131 acres, a multitude of white posts marks each location where 150 simple pine caskets are stacked three deep in the earth. For those who were identified, a name is written in dark chalk on the casket’s lid and sides, with a burial number bored into the wood. The isolated isle is a massive tomb of the unknown pauper, and while no honors are bestowed on those who lie there, a touching dignity can be felt emanating from Hart Island.
In the end, who will remember Richard Churcher? No Broadway play will revive him for the world’s stage; no book or dissertation will expound upon his life. He was significant for five years, but I saw no one snapping selfies in front of his fading epitaph.
Who was he? A cherished son, a prince who would never rule, a downtown denizen when uptown was dense forest with cold streams sipped by the roaming gray wolf, a boy for two and a half million New York minutes. In the north yard, a small branch of magnolia blossoms, broken away by an early spring gust, lay on the ground. I picked up the branch, walked past Charlotte Temple’s slab, past graves I had only briefly stood before, people known and unknown, and placed it at the foot of Richard Churcher’s headstone. I was giving him this moment, I decided, and giving these flowers to everyone forgotten. Who will tell their stories? Who will tell yours? Who will tell mine?
SLAG GLASS CITY · Volume 11 · October 2025
Header image by Edenpictures
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