The Granary Burying Ground had never felt so alive.
Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and Paul Revere were joined by hundreds of tourists wielding cameras, American flags, and a few choice death puns, as history buffs and casual patriots alike converged on the historical burial site on Tremont Street on Independence Day for a taste of Boston’s specialty: US history in the flesh.
Almost all the visitors wore some form of the Stars and Stripes: splashed on a T-shirt, printed on a scarf, or even — for 29-year-old Jenny Dilling from Connecticut — painted across their eyelids in red, white, and blue eyeshadow.
Several Freedom Trail tour guides in Colonial garb, stockings and all, sweated their way through the burial ground, too, pausing with their grateful groups under the cemetery’s leafy branches to rattle off a story about a Founding Father.
In addition to people like Hancock, Adams, and Benjamin Franklin’s parents, the 356-year-old cemetery, the third-oldest in Boston, has about 2,300 gravestones and an estimated 5,000 bodies.
On July 4, many of the gravestones were graced with wreaths and flags, laid there earlier that morning by public officials in a parade from City Hall Plaza to the Old State House.
Visitors came from around the country and around the world, but they agreed on one thing: there’s no place like Boston on the Fourth of July.
“We live in Virginia, where there’s tons of American history. But we’ve never been here on July 4, the birth of our country,’’ said Mike Goodrich, 53, who was visiting with his wife, Laura. “So for us, it’s a real honor.’’
Laura Goodrich’s sequined American flag T-shirt sparkled in the sun as she scrutinized a map of the headstones.
She particularly wanted to see Paul Revere’s grave, she said, because she knew it would be humbler than that of John Hancock, one of the richest men in New England during the Revolution.
Revere, who helped warn patriots of the British army’s approach before the outbreak of the war, was just a “normal guy,’’ Goodrich said.
Revere’s monument — a dignified, 19th-century white pedestal beside the slate-colored original headstone — was the main attraction for most visitors, especially the smallest ones, who had studied him in school. Mia Mayzel, 10, had learned about Revere in fourth grade at her school in San Francisco. So had Grace Sun, 9, in second grade in Chicago.
“It makes me feel really cool to be seeing his tombstone,’’ Sun said.
Dozens of pennies were strewn on Revere’s grave marker, for his work as a pioneering coppersmith. Parents snapped photos of their children in action, laying down another shiny coin in his honor.
Visitors also did not neglect Samuel Adams’s gravesite — though they threw in a few jokes about beer — or John Hancock’s, a towering obelisk that dwarfed the other graves as much as Hancock’s signature on the Declaration of Independence did those of the other Founding Fathers.
Kaci Risser, 35, had just gotten in that morning from South Carolina. She came straight to the Granary from South Station and would be flying out the next day.
“You just need to celebrate the Fourth in Boston at least one year,’’ she said.
Other visitors had already been in Boston for a few days and had attended the morning’s ceremony at the Old State House on Washington Street, where every year on July 4, the captain commanding of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts reads the Declaration of Independence from the balcony to an ebullient crowd, just as it was first done in 1776.
John Wallace, 75, was in town from Nashville with his extended family. Three generations of Wallaces fanned out across the cemetery, reading informative plaques or trying to decipher long-worn inscriptions.
“We’re doing this for the education purposes of our kids, our grandkids, and ourselves,’’ Wallace said. Learning about John Hancock and his role in the Revolution, and then actually seeing where he is laid to rest, Wallace said — “it gives you a lump in your throat about being here.’’
Vivian Wang can be reached at vivian.wang@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @vwang3.
