Iowa, Louisiana: The Town That Came from the Midwest

Iowa, Louisiana, sits in Calcasieu Parish about thirteen miles east of Lake Charles and carries its name from a surprising source: settlers who arrived from Iowa in the eighteen eighties, drawn south by cheap land and the promise of a warm-weather rice frontier. When they platted their community, they named it after the state they had left.

The Louisiana rice industry was just taking shape at that time. Midwesterners brought knowledge of mechanized grain farming and combined it with the Gulf Coast's flat, wet terrain. Railroads connected these new farms to markets in New Orleans and beyond. Iowa today is a small town of about thirty-four hundred people, but its name is a permanent reminder that south Louisiana's rice economy was partly an invention of Midwestern transplants who saw the coastal prairie and recognized something like home.