Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Vinton, LA

Vinton is an incorporated town in western Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana, near the Texas state line, and it is part of the Lake Charles metropolitan statistical area.

Vinton's motto is "Louisiana's Gateway to Cajun Country."

The 2020 census counted 3,400 people in Vinton, living in 1,328 households, with 1,444 housing units in the town.

Vinton began as a railroad whistle stop called Blair on the Louisiana Western Railroad, which opened for traffic on August 30, 1880, completing a direct rail link between New Orleans and Houston.

The town was founded by Dr. Seaman A. Knapp, a former president of Iowa Agricultural College (now Iowa State University), who bought the 160-acre town site from the federal government for $2.50 an acre.

When the settlement's post office was registered, the name Vinton was chosen after Knapp's hometown of Vinton, Iowa, and many of the first settler families were transplants from Iowa whose names still appear on local streets.

Before the railroad arrived, the Vinton area lay within the disputed Neutral Strip, also called the Rio Hondo Territory, a buffer zone between Spanish Texas and the United States that followed the Louisiana Purchase.

About six miles west of town, Niblett's Bluff on the Sabine River became the Confederate Fort Niblett during the Civil War and is now commemorated as Niblett's Bluff Park.

The railroad sparked a logging boom in the area's longleaf pine and cypress forests, and the town's first public school opened in 1890 with Mabel K. Kelly as its first teacher.

In February 1895, a historic blizzard dropped about 22 inches of snow on the Lake Charles area and destroyed Vinton's young sheep industry, but the town recovered and later grew with the discovery of petroleum at Ged Lake, about five miles south.