Norwalk, Connecticut: A Day's "North Walk" or a Native Name?

The story says Norwalk, Connecticut, got its name from a 1640 land deal that ran a day’s “north walk” from the sea. A Norwalk historian called that a fancy, and he and a later scholar of Connecticut’s Native place names both argued the name was older than the deal, a Native name already in use on the river.

A day’s walk for ten looking glasses

The deal itself is real. Edwin Hall, pastor of Norwalk’s First Congregational Church, printed a copy of the deed in his Ancient Historical Records of Norwalk. On February 26, 1640, “the Indians of Norwalke” sold Roger Ludlowe, of Fairfield, the land between two rivers, “the one called Norwalke, the other Soakatuck,” running “from the sea a days walke into the country.” The price is spelled out item by item: eight fathom of wampum, six coats, ten hatchets, ten hoes, ten knives, ten scissors, ten jew’s-harps, ten fathom of tobacco, three kettles and ten looking glasses.

John Warner Barber, who went through the state town by town in 1836, picks up from there. He says that in 1649, on the petition of Nathan Ely and Richard Olmstead, the colony’s court allowed the settlement and “ordained that it should be a town by the name of Norwalk.” And in a footnote, he gives the explanation that Hall would later call “the common tradition”: “The name of Norwalk is derived from the above bargain, viz. the northern bounds of the lands purchased were to extend from the sea one day’s ‘north walk’ into the country.”

“So awkward and improbable a fancy”

Hall didn’t buy it. In the same book where he printed the deed, he wrote: “It is wonderful that so awkward and improbable a fancy ever gained credit. Norwalk is the old Indian name.” His evidence was simple. The Native people there were called “the Norwake Indians,” and the river was “Norwake River” when the English first came. Ludlowe’s purchase was from “The Indians of Norwalke.” The earliest town records spell it Norwalke, with “the w probably silent,” and Hall says the old people of his day still said it “Norruck.”

One catch, and Hall flags it himself: what he printed is a copy, entered in the town’s book of deeds in 1672, so the spelling Norwalke may be the clerk’s rather than the original’s. What the copy still shows is a river and a people already going by that name when the land was sold, before anyone had walked a step of it.

J. Hammond Trumbull, who spent years on Connecticut’s Native place names, came down on Hall’s side in 1881. He found the name in the colony’s records as Norwaake, Norwauke and Norwaack, and elsewhere as Norwoake (1662) and Norwake (1661). “The fact that the modern spelling of the name was not generally adopted for ten years after the purchase and settlement of the town,” he wrote, “is a sufficient reason for rejecting the traditional derivation from the day’s ‘north walk.’” His guess for the meaning: the name “seems to be the equivalent of Nayaug, Noyack, Nyack, etc., ‘a point of land.’”

Which story wins?

The U.S. Geological Survey’s 1905 place-names bulletin, by Henry Gannett, didn’t pick one. It says Norwalk is “said to have been so named because” of the day’s walk, and then adds that “according to another authority” it comes from a word meaning “point of land.”

The walking story has the 1836 footnote behind it, and that’s about it. The Native-name version has the 1640 deed, which, even in its later copy, already uses the river’s name, plus the colony’s early spellings and two writers who went through the records. So the north walk is the better story, but the old river name has the better paper trail. If you’re from Norwalk, you can tell both. Just know which one Hall called a fancy.

Sources & further reading

• Edwin Hall, The Ancient Historical Records of Norwalk, Conn. (1847; 1865 printing), pp. 14–15, 30. “The Name”: the day’s “North-walk” story called “so awkward and improbable a fancy,” “the Norwake Indians,” “Norwake River,” the early spelling Norwalke and the old pronunciation “Norruck” (pp. 14–15); the deed of February 26, 1640, to Roger Ludlowe, with the price and the bounds “from the sea a days walke into the country,” and the note that these “copies” were recorded in the book of deeds in 1672 (p. 30).
• John Warner Barber, Connecticut Historical Collections (1836; 2nd ed. cited), p. 389. The 1649 petition of Nathan Ely and Richard Olmstead, the town “by the name of Norwalk,” and the footnote deriving the name from one day’s “north walk.”
• J. Hammond Trumbull, Indian Names of Places, etc., in and on the Borders of Connecticut (1881), p. 40. The early spellings in the colony’s records, the rejection of the “north walk” derivation, and the reading “a point of land.”
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 227. Both versions: the day’s walk and “point of land.”
• GNIS feature 209405 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Norwalk.