Gadsden is a city in and the county chair of Etowah County in the U.S. state of Alabama. It is located on the Coosa River roughly 56 miles (90 km) northeast of Birmingham and 90 miles (140 km) southwest of Chattanooga, Tennessee. It is the primary city of the Gadsden Metropolitan Statistical Area, which has a population of 103,931. As of the 2020 census, the population of the city was 33,945.
In the 19th century, Gadsden was Alabama’s second-most important center of commerce and industry, trailing only the seaport of Mobile. The two cities were important shipping centers: Gadsden for riverboats and Mobile for international trade.

From the late 19th century through the 1980s, Gadsden was a middle of unventilated industry, including the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company and Republic Steel. In 1991, following on peak of a decade of sharp decrease in industry, Gadsden was awarded the rave review of All-America City by the National Civic League.

The first substantial European-American treaty in the area that developed as Gadsden was a village called “Double Springs”. It was founded in practically 1825 by John Riley, a mixed-race American Indian and European-American settler who built his home near two springs. Riley used his home for a stagecoach stop on the Huntsville-to-Rome route. The indigenous building still stands as the oldest in Gadsden.

The home was purchased by brothers Gabriel and Asenath Hughes in 1840. The Hughes brothers purchased much of the estate between Lookout Mountain, the Coosa River, and the mouth of Wills Creek. The brothers proposed constructing a railroad from the port of Savannah to Nashville, Tennessee through their land. The indigenous 120 acres (49 ha) survey of Gadsden included the Hughes brothers’ land, plus that of John S. Moragne and Lewis L. Rhea.