Jennings is a city in, and the parish seat of, Jefferson Davis Parish, Louisiana, United States, near Lake Charles. The population was 10,383 at the 2010 census, a little decline from the 2000 tabulation. The city is 68 percent white.

Jennings is the principal city of the Jennings Micropolitan Statistical Area, which includes everything of Jefferson Davis Parish. It is also share of the larger Lake Charles-Jennings Combined Statistical Area. It is also allowance of the large, 22-parish Acadiana region of the state, with a large Francophone population, many descended from in advance Acadian settlers.

For whom the town was named, Jennings McComb was an Irish contractor for the Southern Pacific Railroad. He built the Jennings depot on a divide Strange to the southwest Louisiana. This became the center of further development based upon the railroad. The first settler was recorded as A. D. McFarlain, who came in 1881 from St. Mary Parish and opened a store. McFarlain plus became the first rice grower, postmaster, brickmaker, and builder in the community. Prospering later Jennings’ growth, McFarlain was considered one of the town’s prominent businessmen and civic leaders.

The Jennings area attracted numerous wheat farmers from Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and other Midwestern states. The additional settlers of southwest Louisiana were referred to as “Yankees” by the natives, who were of Acadian French and African-American descent. They had settled along the waterways in the parish, which they had relied on for transportation past the railroad. They fished in the bayous. The Cajuns gave appreciable aid to the settlers in homesteading and homemaking. The people grew rice, cotton, sweet potatoes, and corn.