Founding Father’s Early Life Shaped in an Unlikely Place

Alexander Hamilton’s boyhood island of St. Croix was a place of challenge, intellectual curiosity, and possibility.

The Steeple Building in Christiansted, St. Croix was built in 1753, a few years before Alexander Hamilton's birth. Deena Bouknight

While most of America’s notable founding fathers hailed from Virginia, due to the colony’s affluence and influence in the 17th and 18th centuries, one important figure spent his childhood more than 1,500 miles away on a tiny island. Alexander Hamilton was born on Nevis in the British islands sometime between 1755 and 1757.

In 1765, he moved with his parents to St. Croix, an 84-square-mile Caribbean island 154 miles northwest from Nevis. It was there that he learned essential finance and business skills that put him on the path to becoming a prominent figure in the development of the United States.