The village of Batawa is about three miles north of Trenton along the Trent river. It's a little bedroom community for the Trenton and Belleville areas and about 300 or so folks live there. Batawa is the only village that I know of where one has to drive through a factory parking lot to get to it. Naturally it would be the old Bata factory that one has to drive through. Unfortunately it has proven to be too expensive to manufacture shoes in Canada, so the factory is no longer in operation. At one time this factory employed almost 2000 people, but by the late 1990's it was no longer feasible for Bata to keep it open. Thomas Bata came to the area from his native Czechoslovakia in the 1930's to escape the chaos that the Nazis were causing in his home country. The village of Batawa was crea... 02/21/2012