Norfolk County, Massachusetts Colony was one of the original four counties created in the

Massachusetts Bay Colony The Massachusetts Bay Colony (1628–1691), more formally the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, was an English settlement on the east coast of North America around Massachusetts Bay, one of the several colonies later reorganized as the Province of M ...

. The land was originally granted as separate from Massachusetts, but boundary disputes among the settlers led to their petitioning to join the colonial government to the south. The county was created by the

Massachusetts General Court The Massachusetts General Court, formally the General Court of Massachusetts, is the State legislature (United States), state legislature of the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Massachusetts located in the state capital of Boston. Th ...

on May 10, 1643, when it was ordered "that the whole

plantation Plantations are farms specializing in cash crops, usually mainly planting a single crop, with perhaps ancillary areas for vegetables for eating and so on. Plantations, centered on a plantation house, grow crops including cotton, cannabis, tob ...

within this jurisdiction be divided into four sheires". Norfolk County contained the settlements of

Salisbury Salisbury ( , ) is a city status in the United Kingdom, cathedral city and civil parish in Wiltshire, England with a population of 41,820, at the confluence of the rivers River Avon, Hampshire, Avon, River Nadder, Nadder and River Bourne, Wi ...

, Hampton, Haverhill,

Exeter Exeter ( ) is a City status in the United Kingdom, cathedral city and the county town of Devon in South West England. It is situated on the River Exe, approximately northeast of Plymouth and southwest of Bristol. In Roman Britain, Exeter w ...

Dover Dover ( ) is a town and major ferry port in Kent, southeast England. It faces France across the Strait of Dover, the narrowest part of the English Channel at from Cap Gris Nez in France. It lies southeast of Canterbury and east of Maidstone. ...

, and

Portsmouth Portsmouth ( ) is a port city status in the United Kingdom, city and unitary authority in Hampshire, England. Most of Portsmouth is located on Portsea Island, off the south coast of England in the Solent, making Portsmouth the only city in En ...

.Davis, William T. ''Bench and Bar of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts'', p. 44. The Boston History Company, 1895. It effectively encompassed all settlements from the

Merrimack River The Merrimack River (or Merrimac River, an occasional earlier spelling) is a river in the northeastern United States. It rises at the confluence of the Pemigewasset and Winnipesaukee rivers in Franklin, New Hampshire, flows southward into M ...

, north to the Piscataqua River, and extending inland about a dozen miles. In 1680, the

Province of New Hampshire The Province of New Hampshire was an English colony and later a British province in New England. It corresponds to the territory between the Merrimack and Piscataqua rivers on the eastern coast of North America. It was named after the Englis ...

was formally separated from Massachusetts, with Norfolk County forming the core. Massachusetts retained the northern bank of Merrimack River and the towns of Salisbury and Haverhill were added to Essex County. Hampton, Exeter, Dover, and Portsmouth were governed at two levels, town and province/colony, until 1769, when New Hampshire was itself divided into counties, so that Norfolk ceased to exist. The former Norfolk County is often referred to as "Old Norfolk County." Four volumes of records of the Old Norfolk County exist and are at the Essex County Registry of Deeds in Salem. They have been electronically imaged into JPG image files but are not yet online. These four record books were also abstracted by Sidney Perley in ''The Essex Antiquarian''. This magazine (published 1897 to 1911) has also been electronically imaged and some volumes are available at

Google Books Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical charac ...

. A new, unrelated county was established as Norfolk County, Massachusetts from most of the southern portion of Suffolk County in 1793.

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External links

* * {{Coord, 43, 00, 00, N, 71, 00, 00, W, display=title Former counties of the United States Essex County, Massachusetts Pre-statehood history of Massachusetts Pre-statehood history of New Hampshire Former counties of Massachusetts