Batavia, New York

Batavia, the seat of Genesee County in western New York, was founded in eighteen o one when Joseph Ellicott, the agent of the Holland Land Company, chose it as the company's land office headquarters for selling off what is now all of western New York. It was named after the Batavian Republic, the name the French had given to the Netherlands after the revolutionary conquests of the seventeen nineties, because the Holland Land Company was originally a Dutch investment enterprise. The land office Ellicott built here handled the survey and sale of more than three million acres, making Batavia briefly one of the most important real estate offices in North America.

The original land office building still stands and is now a museum. Batavia is also remembered for the disappearance of William Morgan in eighteen twenty-six: a local man who threatened to publish an expose of Freemasonry's secret rituals, Morgan was seized and never seen again, and the scandal sparked the Anti-Masonic Party, one of America's first significant third parties.