Siouan place name (Elkhorn)

[Rory M Larson]

David wrote:
> For what it's worth, my maternal grandmother told me her parents came
from
> [norfork] in England.  The actual spelling of the place, however, is
> "Norfolk".  Somewhere I heard that the local dialect there in England had
> shifted the "l" to an "r" -- so it would only take immigrants from that
> part of England to be the name-givers, and all the other roundabout
> stories can be considered folk (fork) etymology.

I just tried googling on "Norfolk, NE" and came up with the
official town homepage.  It has a couple of paragraphs in the
"About Norfolk" section regarding the etymology.  It seems
the original settlers were German, not Scandinavian or English.
The town was apparently named for a stream called the North Fork
which flows into the Elkhorn at that point.


        On July 17, 1866, a three-train caravan of prairie schooners,
        carrying 44 German families from Ixonia and Watertown, Wisconsin
        arrived at the junction of the Elkhorn and North Fork valleys where
        they were attracted by the rich land open for settlement. These
        pioneers were joined by others from Wisconsin, and formed the
        community that later became Norfolk.


        In 1881, the Village of Norfolk was organized. The settlers
        proclaimed “North Fork” to be their permanent post office address,
        named after the river, but suggested “Norfork” as the simplest
        compounding of “North Fork”. Postal authorities thinking the word
        had been misspelled, changed the spelling to “Norfolk”.




Rory