Dan Issel

Batavia is a suburb of Chicago. It was founded in 1833, and is the oldest city in Kane County, Illinois, with a small portion in DuPage County. During the Industrial Revolution, Batavia became known as ‘The Windmill City’ for being the largest windmill producer of the time. Fermilab, a... federal government-sponsored high-energy physics laboratory, where both the bottom quark and the top quark were first detected, is located here. Batavia is part of a Tri-Cities area, along with St. Charles and Geneva. Its population has been increasing, from 23,866 in the 2000 U.S. census, 25,246 in 2003 to 27,502 in the 2008 U.S. Census Bureau census Batavia was first settled in 1835. The town was named by local judge and former Congressman Isaac Wilson in 1840 after his previous home of Batavia, New York. 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.
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