In total area, it is the smallest county in Alabama, albeit one of the most densely populated.

Etowah County comprises the Gadsden Metropolitan Statistical Area.

Because of postwar tensions and actions of insurgents against freedmen, at the state constitutional convention in 1868, the new county was abolished, replaced on December 1, 1868, by one aligned to the same boundaries and named Etowah County, from a Cherokee-language word.

[5] The Cherokee people in northeast Alabama had been forcibly removed in the 1830s to Indian Territory (now part of Oklahoma) west of the Mississippi River.

Etowah County had issues of racial discrimination and injustice, and Jim Crow.

[7] Bunk Richardson, an innocent African-American, only because he was associated with a case in which a white woman was raped and killed.

The whites were angry that the governor had commuted the death sentence of one defendant in the case (who was likely also innocent of charges), after two men had already been executed for the crime.

It destroyed Piedmont's Goshen United Methodist Church twelve minutes after the National Weather Service of Birmingham issued a tornado warning for northern Calhoun, southeastern Etowah, and southern Cherokee counties.

As of the 2020 United States census, there were 103,436 people, 40,053 households, and 25,177 families residing in the county.

The last Democrat to win the county in a presidential election is Bill Clinton, who won it by a plurality in 1996.