Norfolk ne Wedding

Norfolk is a city in Madison County, Nebraska, 113 miles northwest of Omaha at the intersection of U.S. Route 81 and U.S. Route 275. The 2005 population estimate was 23,946. It is the only micropolitan area in northeast Nebraska.

Norfolk is the eastern terminus of the Cowboy Trail.

In the late summer of 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)