It is named for a Hasinai Native American woman who assisted early Spanish missionaries and was called Angelina by them.

[4] The county's first Anglo settlers were what John Nova Lomax described as "Scotch-Irish backwoods folk.

Lomax added that "Culturally, the county was less moonlight-and-magnolias Dixie than a little pocket of Appalachia, where pioneers, often from similarly hardscrabble areas of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, wanted nothing more than to carve homesteads out of the Piney Woods and river thickets, farm a little, maybe raise a scraggly herd of tough cattle to drive to market in New Orleans.

"[5] Lomax added that "[t]hey also wanted to brew up a little whiskey and subsist on the bass, catfish and perch they hauled from the Neches and Angelina rivers and whatever they could trap and shoot on dry land.

The population increased quickly thereafter due to the good farming land and to the rivers, which made steamboat transportation possible.

Angelina County was settled predominantly by natives of the southern United States, some of them slaveowners who established plantations in their new Texas home.

Cotton culture, however, occupied only 2,048 acres of county land in 1858, a relatively small area for East Texas.

Angelina County had also given the Constitutional Union party candidate, John Bell, a strong minority vote in the 1860 election.

[16] However, the small community of Burke voted to restrict alcohol sales only to restaurants holding permits.

John Nova Lomax of the Houston Press said that the residents of Angelina County "were, and are, a self-sufficient breed, good with their hands, bluntly honest and leery of all central authority.

"[5] Angelina County was the seat of power of Charlie Wilson, a politician labeled the "Liberal from Lufkin".

[5] The current state representative from Angelina County is Republican Trent Ashby, first elected in 2012.