Norton Shores: Incorporated to Stay Independent

The city of Norton Shores exists primarily because its residents did not want to be swallowed by Muskegon. Norton Township had been organized since eighteen forty-five, named for Colonel Amos Norton, a Canadian patriot who had been among the earliest figures in the county's settlement. By the nineteen sixties, urban expansion threatened to absorb the township through annexation by neighboring Muskegon and Muskegon Heights.

Residents voted two to one to incorporate as a Home Rule City, and the charter was adopted on April sixteenth, nineteen sixty-eight. The defensive incorporation worked. Norton Shores today is a separate city of roughly twenty-five thousand people along the Lake Michigan shoreline, with its own identity distinct from the urban core it chose not to join.