In the early 1830's, the Catholic Church acquired forty acres from the Military Tract in Hancock County, Illinois, land originally set aside for veteran survivors of the War of 1812, with title vested in the Most Reverend Peter Richard Kenrick, Archbishop of St. Louis. On August 16, 1849, forty acres of this tract were conveyed to the Right Reverend James Vandeveld, Bishop of Chicago. In 1866, the Catholic Church sold thirty acres, and on July 25, 1877, the remaining ten acres were conveyed by Thomas Foley, administrator of Vandeveld's estate, to John Lancaster Spaulding, Catholic Bishop of Peoria. Later, nine more acres were conveyed to Martin W. Burrow, leaving one acre in the present cemetery. St. Simon the Apostle Cemetery took its name from a nearby Catholic chapel built by Henry Riley from 1832 to 1834 with assistance from a son of James B. Lincoln, President Lincoln's first cousin. The chapel was used from 1834 to 1857 and was later moved to Tennessee in McDonough County, Illinois. Fifty people are buried here, including twelve of President Lincoln's Hancock County relatives. Among them were Abraham Lincoln, President Lincoln's first cousin, who after settling in Hancock County served as grand juryman of the circuit court, as a petit juryman, as election judge for Crooked Creek Precinct in 1834, and as the second justice of the peace of Fountain Green Township, and James B. Lincoln, also President Lincoln's first cousin, who became the first justice of the peace of Fountain Green Township, one of Hancock County's three commissioners, and a road viewer for a road past Fountain Green to Edward White's Ferry on the Mississippi.