1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Norwalk (Ohio)

NORWALK, a city and the county-seat of Huron county, Ohio, U.S.A., about 55 m. W.S.W. of Cleveland. Pop. (1900) 7074, including 762 foreign-born and 101 negroes; (1910) 7858. It is served by the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern, and the Wheeling & Lake Erie railways, and by interurban electric lines. It has a public library in which a small museum is maintained by the Firelands Historical Society. The city is the centre of a rich agricultural district. Among its manufactures are machine-shop products (the Wheeling & Lake Erie has shops here), iron and steel, pianos and automobile fittings.

Norwalk was settled in 1817 and was named from Norwalk, Connecticut; it was incorporated as a town in 1829 and chartered as a city in 1881. Huron county and Erie county immediately N. are the westernmost of the counties created from the “Western Reserve,” and comprise the “Fire Lands” grant made in 1792 by the state of Connecticut to the people of Greenwich, Fairfield, Danbury, Ridgefield, Norwalk, New Haven, East Haven and New London to indemnify them for their fire losses during the British expeditions in Connecticut under Governor Tryon in 1779 and Benedict Arnold in 1781. The Connecticut grantees were incorporated in 1803 as “the proprietors of the half-million acres of land lying south of Lake Erie”.