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Batavia.

Batavia was settled in 1833 by Christopher Payne and his family. The settlement was originally called Big Woods (or 'Head of the Big Woods,' which is what Abraham Lincoln called it in his writings) for the timber stand the first families pushed into. Local judge and former Congressman Isaac Wilson renamed the town Batavia in 1840 after his prior hometown of Batavia, New York. By the latter half of the 1800s, six American-style windmill companies were operating here, and by the late 19th century the town was billed as the 'Windmill Capital of the World.' Into the early 20th century, most of the windmill-powered water pumps on American farms were built at one of three Batavia factories.

The second era starts in the late 1960s. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission selected a 6,800-acre site west of town in 1966 for what was then called the National Accelerator Laboratory. It was formally occupied in 1968, renamed Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in 1974, and Wilson Hall (named for founding director Robert R. Wilson) was built between 1971 and 1974. From 1983 until 2011, Fermilab ran the Tevatron, the most powerful particle accelerator in the world until CERN's Large Hadron Collider came online. Top-quark discovery in 1995 happened here. Today the Tevatron is shut down, but the campus is open to the public, the Lederman Science Center runs interactive exhibits, and more than 1,100 acres of reconstructed tallgrass prairie sit inside the lab fence.