At the southwest corner of Broadway and Rector Street, where a sky-scraper is now, Grace Church once stood with a graveyard about it. The church was completed in 1808, and was there until 1846, when the present structure was erected at Broadway and Tenth Street. Upon the Rector Street site, the Trinity Lutheran Church, a log structure, was built in 1671. It was rebuilt in 1741, and was burned in the great fire of 1776.
Trinity Churchyard
Trinity churchyard is part of a large tract of land, granted to the Trinity Corporation in 1705, that was once the Queen's Farm.
Annetje Jans's Farm
In 1635 there were a number of bouweries or farms above the Fort. The nearest—one extending about to where Warren Street is—was set apart for the Dutch West India Company, and called the Company's Farm. Above this was another, bounded approximately by what are now Warren and Charlton Streets, west of Broadway. This last was given by the company, in 1635, to Roelof Jansz (contraction of Jannsen), a Dutch colonist. He died the following year, and the farm became the property of his wife, Annetje Jans. (In the feminine, the z being omitted, the form became Jans.) The farm was sold to Francis Lovelace, the English Governor, in 1670, and he added it to the company's farm, and it became thereafter the Duke's Farm. In 1674 it became the King's Farm. When Queen Anne began her reign it became the Queen's Farm, and it was she who granted it to Trinity, making it the Church Farm.
In 1731, which was sixty-one years after the Annetje Jans's farm was sold to Governor Lovelace, the descendants of Annetje Jans for the first time decided that they had yet some interest in the farm, and made an unsuccessful protest. From time to time since protests in the form of lawsuits have been made, but no court has sustained the claims.
The city's growth was retarded by church ownership of land, as no one wanted to build on leasehold property. It was not until the greater part of available land on the east side of the island was built upon that the church property was made use of on the only terms it could be had. Not until 1803 were the streets from Warren to Canal laid out.
Trinity Church was built in 1697. For years before, however, there had been a burying-ground beyond the city and the city's wall that became the Trinity graveyard of to-day. The waving grass extended to a bold bluff overlooking Hudson River, which was about where Greenwich Street now is. Through the bluff a street was cut, its passage being still plainly to be seen in the high wall on the Trinity Place side of the graveyard.
Oldest Grave In Trinity Churchyard
The oldest grave of which there is a record is in the northern section of the churchyard, on the left of the first path. It is that of a child, and is marked with a sandstone slab, with a skull, cross-bones and winged hour-glass cut in relief on the back, the inscription on the front reading: