Princeton Cemetery
Old churchyard with the graves of Aaron Burr, Grover Cleveland, and Kurt Gödel
Two blocks north of Nassau Street, Princeton Cemetery is one of the oldest active burial grounds in New Jersey — opened in 1757 by the Nassau Presbyterian Church and still in use. The walking path runs past Vice President Aaron Burr, President Grover Cleveland, mathematician Kurt Gödel, theologian Jonathan Edwards (the third president of the College of New Jersey), and a long roll-call of nineteenth-century Princeton academic dynasties.
A free walking-tour map is available at the entrance gate or online. Allow about 45 minutes for the headline graves; the cemetery as a whole rewards a longer wander.
things to do
sight
history
A story
Aaron Burr — the third Vice President, killer of Alexander Hamilton in their 1804 duel, briefly a candidate for President, and afterward a defendant in the strangest treason trial in American history — is buried here near his father, the second president of the college that became Princeton. A few rows away lies Kurt Gödel, the Austrian-born logician whose incompleteness theorems re-shaped twentieth-century mathematics; nearby is Grover Cleveland, the only American president to serve two non-consecutive terms. Few cemeteries this small contain so much of the country's intellectual and political weather.