Emergency Biohazard Cleanup Services in Ina, IL

Ina is a village in Jefferson County in southern Illinois, part of the Mount Vernon Micropolitan Statistical Area.

Many Cherokee families settled around Ina about 1840, apparently refugees from the Trail of Tears, giving the area an unusually early Native American resettlement history.

The area's first main settlement was Spring Garden, about 3 miles northeast of Ina, which prospered from 1848 until the Chicago and Eastern Illinois Railroad built through Ina in 1905 and drew activity away.

Ina gained national notoriety in 1924, when the Rev. Lawrence Hight and his lover Elsie Sweeten were found to have poisoned Sweeten's husband in July and Hight's wife in September — autopsies revealed arsenic in both cases.

The village sits on high ground between Casey Creek and Gun Creek, both tributaries of the Big Muddy River, and arms of Rend Lake — the big reservoir formed by damming the Big Muddy — reach up both creeks toward the village.

Ina is home to the Big Muddy River Correctional Center, a medium-security Illinois state prison that opened in March 1993 just south of the village and stands as one of Jefferson County's largest employers.

Because the prison was annexed into the village, Ina's census numbers are dominated by its roughly 1,850 male inmates: the official population leapt from 489 in 1990 to 2,455 in 2000 once the inmates were counted, and stood at 1,641 in 2020.

Rend Lake College, the area's community college, lies just southwest of the village limits but carries an Ina mailing address.

The village covers about 2.41 square miles, all land, along Illinois Route 37 near Interstate 57.