Benton County Historical Society
Vinton, Iowa
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Home of:
Vinton Depot
and Horridge House
Vinton History
In 1923, Vinton was one of the confirmed stops for Bobbie the Wonder Dog. After being separated from his family while on a trip to Indiana, Bobbie was able to find his way home to Oregon, a journey of almost 3,000 miles, making a stop in Vinton on his travels. The story of Bobbie the Wonder Dog made national news, appeared in Ripley’s Believe It or Not book, as well as the film The Call of the West, and received hundreds of letters from all over the world.
Local baseball hero, Edmund “Bing” Miller, hit the winning run in the 1929 World Series playing for the Philadelphia Athletics against the Chicago Cubs. His start in baseball began in Vinton, at the tender age of sixteen, as a player for the Vinton Cinders, their home field sat where the current Benton County Fairgrounds is located. The nickname “Bing” came from a comic strip called George Washington Bings that his brother saw in the Vinton Eagle.
In the mid-1800's the town was known as Northport. Three special commissioners met on the first Monday of May, 1846 to establish a county seat and located it on the northeast quarter of section 21, township 85 north, range 10 west. Later that year a two story hewn log courthouse was built. It was twenty by twenty-four feet with three rooms in the upper floor. But the original town plat of Northport was never legally recorded so on February 12, 1848 the then county commissioners filed the plat under the name Vinton.
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