Iola is a city in Grimes County, Texas, United States, on Farm Road 39 and the Burlington-Rock Island Railway, at the headwaters of Ragan Creek in northwest Grimes County. As of the 2010 census the population was 401.

On November 6, 2007, it became the fifth incorporated city in Grimes County after a residential vote.

Iola is believed to have been named for Edward Ariola, one of Stephen F. Austin’s colonists who established in the vicinity in 1836. In 1852 the community’s first church, Zion Methodist, was constructed; the building after that served as a schoolhouse. The settlement’s first gristmill, Monroe’s Gin, began full of life during the 1860s. The pronounce office opened in 1871 and, though discontinued the next-door year, was every time reestablished in 1877. A Masonic Lodge was formed in 1876. By the 1880s the town had several churches, cotton gins, and gristmills. The population stood at 109 by 1890.

Between 1906 and 1907 both the Trinity and Brazos Valley Railway and the Houston and Texas Central Railway Elongated lines through Iola, and a other townsite was laid out along the tracks close the T&BV depot. A tap parentage of the Texas and New Orleans Railroad united Iola later Navasota. The coming of the railroad invigorated the community. A print shop was established, and a newspaper appeared, the Iola Enterprise, edited and published by Rev. A. J. Frick, pastor of Zion Methodist Church. In 1909 the Iola State Bank was organized. The population reached 300 in 1910, and by 1936 the town had an estimated 500 people and twelve businesses.