The history of Norton Park, Duluth, Minnesota
Part of the Norton Park neighborhood guide. Back to the full guide.
Norton Park grew as a far-west residential pocket on the Grand Avenue corridor, housing people who worked along the river and the rail during West Duluth's long industrial period. Its build window, roughly 1900 to 1970, tracks that.
The two creeks define its edges and always have. Kingsbury Creek to the east and Knowlton Creek to the west both drop from the hillside to the river, and the neighborhood is the ground between them, which is why it never grew large.
The most interesting piece of Norton Park's history is civic rather than industrial. The Norton Park Community Center was built in 1965, constructed of steel supplied by the Duluth Steel Building Company, and the grounds around it are recorded as among the last community parks in Duluth maintained by neighborhood residents rather than by the city. That is a genuinely unusual arrangement in a city of this size, and it says something about the place: a small neighborhood that has kept doing its own upkeep long after most stopped. Local accounts credit long-term residents, including Charles J. Oliver, a lifelong resident and Denfeld graduate, with sustaining it.
The trails came later and changed what the neighborhood is for. The Willard Munger State Trail was built on an abandoned rail corridor, and its northern terminus landing at 75th Avenue West turned a quiet residential pocket into a trailhead. There have long been plans to extend the Munger north to Canal Park and connect it to the Lakewalk, which would make this the middle of a cross-city route rather than the end of a regional one.
The June 2012 regional flood is the recent chapter, tearing through the Kingsbury Creek corridor on the neighborhood's eastern edge and doing serious damage. It belongs in any account of this ground.
History next door
Northeast, with the Lake Superior Zoo and the Keene Creek dog park.
IrvingNortheast toward the bay, flat streets with a park and playfield of its own.
RiversideSouthwest along the river, quieter still, with a shipbuilding history and the Munger Trail running through.
SmithvilleSouthwest along the river, the highest owner-occupancy in the far west and Bardon Peak above it.
Spirit ValleyNortheast, the main street where most Norton Park errands actually happen.