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is a city in Madison County, Nebraska, United States, 113 miles northwest of Omaha and 83 miles west of Sioux City at the intersection of U.S. Routes 81 and 275. The population was 23,516 at the 2000 census. It is the only micropolitan area in northeast Nebraska. Among Nebraskans, the widely accepted pronunciation for Norfolk is Nor-fork (named after the North Fork of the Elkhorn River), not Nor-folk as the name is usually pronounced.
In late 1865, three scouts were sent from a German Lutheran settlement near Ixonia, Wisconsin near Watertown to find productive, inexpensive farmland. They traveled from Chicago to St. Joseph, Missouri by train, and then traveled by ferry to Omaha to begin their search. After initially spurning West Point as too crowded, they finally laid claim to land about four miles north of where the North Fork of the Elkhorn River joined the main branch in September of that year.
On May 23, 1866, 124 settlers representing 42 families set out for Northeast Nebraska in three wagon trains. They arrived a few months later, on July 15. (Pangle, 1929)
Norfolk briefly held the county seat for Madison County, from approximately 1867 to 1875. In a four-city election, nearby Battle Creek and Madison eliminated Norfolk from consideration, and after Madison won the runoff election, the county seat permanently moved there. Norfolk has tried unsuccessfully to win back the county government: unsuccessfully contesting the 1875 election to the Nebraska Supreme Court; failing to gain enough of a majority in a new vote in 1886; and most recently, losing an election to Madison for placement of a county courthouse in the 1970s.
On September 26, 2002, Norfolk was the site of one of the deadliest bank robberies in the nation when three gunmen robbed a US Bank branch, killing five people in the process.