Fast Facts
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Batavia, known as the Windmill City, founded in 1833, is a city mostly and originally in Kane County, Illinois, and also in DuPage County, Illinois.. Its population was 23,866 at the time of the 2000 U.S. Census. The Fermilab, a federal government-sponsored high-energy physics laboratory, where both the bottom quark and top quarks were first detected, is located here. Batavia was on the front lines of the Black Hawk War in which Abraham Lincoln was a citizen soldier, and Zachary Taylor and Jefferson Davis were Army officers. Although there is no direct evidence that any of them were actually in Batavia, there are writings by Lincoln that refer to "Head of the Big Woods", which was the original name of Batavia given by its original settler, Christopher Payne. Mary Todd Lincoln was an involuntary resident in 1875. In the late 1800s, Batavia was a major manufacturer of the Conestoga wagons used in the country's westward expansion. Into the early 1900s, most of the windmill operated waterpumps in use throughout America's farms were made at one of the three windmill manufacturing companies in Batavia.. Many of the original limestone buildings that were part of these factories are still in use today as government and commercial offices and storefronts. A 2002 special census put the city's population at 25,246. Batavia is part of a Tri-Cities area, along with St. Charles and Geneva.
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