Emergency Biohazard Cleanup Near West Dunkirk Dunkirk, NY

Dunkirk is a city in Chautauqua County on the southeastern shore of Lake Erie, and it is the westernmost city in the state of New York.

The city was settled around 1805 and incorporated in 1880, and it was named after Dunkirk (Dunkerque) in France, its present-day sister city.

Before European settlement the lakeshore was home to the Iroquoian-speaking Erie people and later the Seneca, who called the place Tga'daesös; European-American settlement of Chadwick Bay began in 1826.

The Dunkirk Lighthouse at Point Gratiot, built soon after the settlement of Chadwick Bay, still stands on the Lake Erie shore.

The 2020 census counted 12,743 people in Dunkirk, in 5,431 households, with Hispanic or Latino residents making up about 35 percent of the population.

Brooks Locomotive Works, founded in Dunkirk in 1869 by Horatio G. Brooks, built almost 4,000 steam locomotives, some of them hailed as the fastest and largest in the world, before merging into the American Locomotive Company in 1901.

The homestead of locomotive builder Horatio G. Brooks became Brooks Memorial Hospital after a donation by his daughter in 1898.

The Chautauqua County Fair, which dates sporadically to 1821, has been held regularly in Dunkirk since 1881 on its permanent fairgrounds.

In 1946 Dunkirk won international recognition for the Dunkirk-to-Dunkerque campaign, a humanitarian relief program for its war-devastated French namesake that became a model for similar efforts across the United States.

In 2016 Willie Rosas became the first Hispanic person elected mayor of a city in New York State when he won the Dunkirk mayoralty.