Ina is a village in Jefferson County, Illinois, United States. The population was 1,641 as of the 2020 census. It is part of the Mount Vernon Micropolitan Statistical Area.
History
Many Cherokee families settled in Ina around 1840. They were apparently refugees from the Trail of Tears. In the 1800s, Ina was jokingly referred to as "the Cherokee Reservation".
The main settlement in this area was Spring Garden, about northeast of Ina. Spring Garden prospered from 1848 until the Chicago and Eastern Illinois Railroad was built in 1905. After that, the population and business shifted over to the depots at Ina and Bonnie.
Crimes
An infamous murder case occurred in Ina in 1924, when Rev. Lawrence Hight and his lover Elsie Sweeten poisoned Sweeten's husband in July and Hight's wife in September. Autopsies revealed arsenic. Hight and Sweeten were both sent to prison. Elsie Sweeten was granted another trial and was later acquitted of murder and released from jail.
Over six decades later a quadruple homicide occurred outside of town. The victims were the Dardeen family, who lived in a mobile home on Illinois Route 37 just north of the Franklin County line. One evening in November 1987, the police came to the house since Keith Dardeen had not shown up for his job at the Rend Lake Water Conservancy District treatment plant that morning and did not answer phone calls. Elaine had not been raped, valuable items remained in the house, and police found no reason why anyone might want to have killed the family. Serial killer Tommy Lynn Sells confessed to the crime after he was arrested in Texas in 2000; however, police and the other members of the Dardeen family did not completely believe his accounts, which he changed three times, and he did not seem to know any nonpublic information about the crime. He was never charged before his 2014 execution, and officially the Dardeens' killings remain unsolved.
Ina is located on high ground between Casey Creek and Gun Creek, both tributaries of the Big Muddy River. The Big Muddy has been dammed to form Rend Lake, with arms of the lake extending up the two tributaries.
Ina is the home of the Big Muddy River Correctional Center. Rend Lake College, with an Ina mailing address, is outside the village limits to the southwest.
Demographics
The following population figures for Ina were greatly influenced by the approximately 1,850 male inmates who were included from the Big Muddy River Correctional Center, which had been annexed to the original village.
2020 census
As of the 2020 census, there were 1,641 people, 190 households, and 125 families residing in the village. The population density was . There were 214 housing units at an average density of .
There were 190 households in Ina, of which 28.9% had children under the age of 18 living in them. Of all households, 45.3% were married-couple households, 17.9% were households with a male householder and no spouse or partner present, and 32.1% were households with a female householder and no spouse or partner present. About 30.5% of all households were made up of individuals, and 15.7% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 3.46 and the average family size was 2.62.