Batavia was founded in 1833, and is the oldest city in Kane County, Illinois, with a small portion in DuPage County. 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. Mary Todd Lincoln was an involuntary resident of the Batavia Institute in 1875.In the late 19th century

According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 9.19 square miles (23.8 km2), of which, 9.05 square miles (23.4 km2) of it is land and 0.14 square miles (0.36 km2) of it (1.52%) is water.

Batavia is served by Batavia Public School District No. 101. The district currently consists of six K-5 elementary schools, one 6-8 middle school, and Batavia High School. Fermilab, a federal government-sponsored high-energy physics laboratory, where both the bottom quark and top quarks were first detected, is located here