Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Gadsden, AL

Gadsden is a city in and the county seat of Etowah County in northeastern Alabama, built on both banks of the Coosa River about 56 miles northeast of Birmingham.

The first substantial settlement on the site was the village of Double Springs, founded about 1825 by John Riley, whose house served as a stagecoach stop and still stands as the oldest building in Gadsden.

Residents renamed the town for Colonel James Gadsden of South Carolina, later famous for negotiating the Gadsden Purchase, after Captain James Lafferty piloted the steamboat Coosa to the landing on July 4, 1845.

Gadsden was incorporated on March 9, 1871, and it remains the seat of Etowah County, which the legislature first organized as Baine County in 1867 and renamed the following year.

In the 19th century, Gadsden was Alabama's second-most important center of commerce and industry, trailing only the seaport of Mobile, thanks to its riverboat trade on the Coosa River.

From the late 19th century through the 1980s, Gadsden was a center of heavy industry anchored by employers such as the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company and Republic Steel.

Gadsden's population peaked at 58,088 in 1960 before decades of industrial decline; the 2020 census counted 33,945 residents in 14,141 households.

The city's motto is "City of Champions," a nickname earned in the 1950s after Gadsden won a national high school band competition and a Little League trophy at about the same time.

Noccalula Falls Park, a 250-acre city park, is centered on a 90-foot waterfall where Black Creek pours into a gorge; the name Noccalula is thought to derive from a Cherokee term meaning "place where water thunders."

A nine-foot bronze statue of the Cherokee maiden Noccalula, dedicated in 1969, stands at the brink of the falls and commemorates the local legend that she leapt to her death rather than enter a forced marriage.