 |
THE PEOPLE THAT COME HERE are the people who keep this town growing,” said Norfolk resident, caterer, and restaurateur Larry “Stocky” Stockman.
While the self-proclaimed creator of the “world’s best burger” was referring to the customers who frequent his small diner on Madison Avenue, he could have just as well been describing the citizens who settled and built Norfolk, as well as those who have been born here, and have come here since.
While the nickname fits the man to a “T,” the business that shares the same moniker is a gathering place for some of Norfolk’s hardest-working folk.
“If you need a house built, this is where you come to talk business,” said Stocky, motioning toward his lunch crowd that includes construction workers, plumbers, drywall hangers, carpenters and electricians.
This is more than just a blue-collar hangout, though. Like a microcosm of the community of Norfolk itself, population 24,210, people from all walks of life gather here.
“We have lawyers and doctors that come here and eat right next to mechanics smelling of diesel fuel,” Stockman adds. “And, we have millionaires sitting next to people with almost nothing.”
In a letter dated Feb. 9, 1914, Mrs. A. Steinkraus describes how little the band of German Lutheran immigrants had when they settled near the North Fork of the Elkhorn River in 1866.
“In the year of 1866, we came from near Watertown, Wisconsin to Norfolk and located on a homestead a little east of where Norfolk now lays. There were forty-two families came [sic] at the same time and each family had one covered wagon driven by four oxen. Each one brought two cows and a few sheep which were driven along by the women folk.”
Those hardy settlers scratched a living from the land, and settlers continued to flood into the fertile region.
Soon, a petition for a post office was sent to Washington, D.C., for the community of Norfork. A presumptuous government official, thinking the name was misspelled, changed it to “Norfolk.” Not to be pushed around by a far-off bureaucrat, the resolute citizens of the community pronounced it “Nor-fork.” And, they still do today.
 |
That Elkhorn River and its sidekick, the North Fork, through periodic flooding, created the fertile soil that the settlers so adored.
Indians were said to have warned their new neighbors of the river’s mean streak, urging them not to settle near the torrent the tribe called Ta-ha-zouka (horn of the elk), but those concerns fell on the deaf ears of the stout settlers.
Floods devastated the region 10 times between 1870 and 1962, with particularly damaging deluges occurring in 1944 and 1962.
“There was water from 7th Street clear past 1st Street,” remembers Robert Groninger, who was a 12-year-old farm boy when the 1944 flood targeted Norfolk.
Groninger lived on a sandy farm west of Norfolk where they never had to worry about flooding. But like many others, the Groningers came to town to see the damage.
“We saw a boat coming right down the middle of 4th Street,” Groninger said, with a laugh. But the strangest sight came later that day.
It starts out like a bad joke: “A man and his horse walk into a bar…”
The Groninger family was having lunch in Norfolk’s 5th Street Tavern before heading back to their Battle Creek farm, when a man came in – with his horse in tow.
“It’s no joke,” Groninger said.
“The horse came in and the bartender gave it a drink. It had its fill of water already I suspect. The horse, he was drinking beer,” Groninger said.
Despite the devastation he witnessed in the floodplain as a boy, all these years later Groninger lives with his wife, Shirley, in a part of Norfolk that was underwater in that 1944 flood. Housing and business have thrived in the floodplain, both measuring security in the massive earthen levee that starts on the north edge of town at Highway 81, and cuts a protective arch east through Norfolk and ending at Highway 275.
