Florimont, at 384 m, lies 5 km east of
Delle and about 21 km southeast the city Belfort (as the crow flies). The village extends in the transient area between the flat country of the
Belfort Gap and the northern foothills of the
Juras, in the Coeuvatte valley at the north foothills of Florimont, close to the border with Switzerland. The village that in 2023 had a population of 473, had 398 in 1803. The area is relatively large: 18.19 km ² and extends over a dozen kilometers from north to south. Florimont, which was an important manor in the
Middle Ages, incorporated into its territory the disappeared villages of Normanvillars and Saint-Andre-d'Essert.
Placenames and hamlets ''' Saint-André-d'Essert ''' This village, of which there only remains the farm of Saint-André, one kilometer from
Faverois, should not be confused with the city of
Essert, near
Belfort, although the origin of the name is undoubtedly the same: a cultivable ground reclaimed from the forest. In the seventeenth century Saint-André had a church which would have already existed sometime between 1274 and at least 1466, when a priest officiated there. It was restored in 1606 but was threatened with ruin in 1749. By the end of the eighteenth century all that remained there were four
Anabaptist families, and the church disappeared. The hamlet belongs to the parish of Faverois. In texts written in German, Essert is Germanized as
Schert.
Normanvillars Normanvillars was a
Mennonite settlement on the border of the
Sundgau (southern
Alsace) and the Territory of Belfort in a forest area called by that name. It was about 10–15 miles (16–25 km) northeast of
Montbéliard, southeast of Belfort, and north of Delle. The settlement was established between 1747 and 1780 by Mennonite families coming from the Swiss Jura to the south and a few
Amish families coming from the Montbéliard area to the southwest. By 1791, according to a military census, 23 of the 97 families in the commune of Florimont were Mennonite. By the end of the eighteenth century this rather extended settlement was divided into two organized congregations, both meeting in homes, the one to the north called La Maie (later Belfort), the one in the south called Florimont. The first meetinghouse at Normanvillars, the Chapelle des Fermes, was erected in 1849 after many members had emigrated. The beginning of emigration to North America was in 1819. A number of families settled in
Putnam County, Ohio, others in western
Waterloo County, Ontario. It is probable that Normanvillars disappeared at the same time as Saint-André d'Essert, in the second half of the fifteenth century, victim of the instability which reigned then in the countryside. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the Mennonites, famous for being experienced farmers, took possession again of the places and formed a locality dependent on the seigniory of Florimont. Nowadays, the hamlet is summarized as being a few farms spread over a vast clearing in the middle of which is a chapel known as the
Chappel of the Mennonites and a cemetery. ==History==