Aquilla Moffatt arrived here in 1822 and began mining and milling ventures. After returning from the Black Hawk War, he built his home on South Adams Street and set aside a small burying ground for family and friends. After the Civil War he named an adjacent parcel Union Cemetery for veterans. In the 1870s he sold these parcels, along with land bordering Adams and Griswold streets, to investors who formed the Moffatt Cemetery Association. Burials increased rapidly until the cemetery was ordered closed in 1905. It was then abandoned, and efforts to save it over five decades were unsuccessful. Court actions in the 1950s gathered share rights, the property was rezoned, gravestones and trees were cleared, and parcels were sold to businesses. Cemetery records were thought lost and those buried there relocated, but only about 100 transfers are known. Undertaker reports stored for a century were later found and document burials of about 2,500 individuals, and recent research has identified more than 200 additional burials. Today, 2,600 individuals known by name still lie buried there. Among them is Nance Legins-Costley, the first enslaved person Abraham Lincoln helped free in an 1841 Illinois Supreme Court case. Fifty-two veterans were interred: 49 Union Civil War soldiers, including an African American who was at Juneteenth in Galveston Texas, and one each from the 1792 Virginia militia, the War of 1812, and the Spanish-American War. Also interred are remains of unknown people buried in a mass grave that were removed in 46 crates from Peoria's first public cemetery during work along Lincoln Avenue. Those buried there are a cross section of the community, including many infants and children, and mostly hard-working immigrants, African Americans, and others.