Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Inola, OK

Inola is a town in Rogers County in northeastern Oklahoma, about 28 miles east of Tulsa and part of the Tulsa metropolitan area.

Inola's name is a Cherokee word meaning 'Black Fox,' bestowed by William P. Ross, a two-time principal chief of the Cherokee Nation.

Inola styles itself the 'Hay Capital of the World' and has celebrated its Hay Day festival every June since 1962, complete with a parade, frog-jumping contests and turtle races.

Inola's post office was established in March 1890, the town was platted by the Dawes Commission in 1902, and it grew up around the Kansas and Arkansas Valley Railway line built through the area in 1889.

Inola boomed briefly on coal strip mining before statehood, then shrank to just 294 residents by 1950 before Tulsa commuters reversed its fortunes.

Inola's population was 1,890 in the 2020 census, in about 682 households — more than six times its 1950 low.

Inola was the planned site of the Black Fox Nuclear Power Plant, proposed by the Public Service Company of Oklahoma in 1973 with two boiling-water reactors about three miles from town; after nine years of protests and court battles, the project was abandoned in 1982 and never built.

Inola's abandoned nuclear site was reborn as the Inola River/Rail Industrial Park, where the Italian tissue maker Sofidel opened a $360 million paper plant in October 2020 employing more than 300 people.

Inola has grown into a bedroom community for Tulsa while keeping its own prekindergarten-through-12th-grade school district, which enrolled about 1,337 students in 2000.

Inola sits near the historic border between the Creek and Cherokee nations, on land that was the northeastern corner of the Creek Nation in Indian Territory.