Old Jail Museum
Welcome to the Old Jail Museum in Lamar County, Georgia. Here, you will find more information regarding the history of our building
Our Location and History
We are located at 326 Thomaston Street in Barnesville Georgia
(directly behind the Lamar County Courthouse)
Hours of operation:
11am - 3pm (Wed)
10am-2pm (Sat)
Admission is a $1 donation
The Museum consists of two separate buildings: the old Lamar County jail and the Crowder Bros.' gin house office. The gin house office was moved to the museum site to house the horse-drawn vehicles. It was donated by Laura & Walter Geiger.
The Old Jail Museum & Archives is housed in the old Lamar County Jail building. This building, completed in 1938, was a WPA structure. The Sheriff and his family lived downstairs and his inmates were housed upstairs in cells. This building was used for inmates until 1992 when a new detention center was completed on Roberta Drive. After removing room partitions and opening up doorways, the building was ready for occupancy in September of 1995.
The facility has a dual purpose; one being a museum and the other genealogical research. The archives processes dozens of requests for research each month. There is no charge for research, it is through donations for research that the facility is financially supported.
The following categories can be found in the archives:
Family files, courthouse records, obituaries, marriages, passports through the Indian Nations, Federal Consensus records, criminal records, tax digests, land lotteries, mortality schedules, Confederate pension records, Confederate rosters, photograph collections, manuscript collections, Bible records, baptismal records, cemetery records, funeral parlor records, military records for the Revolution, War of 1812, Indian Wars, Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean Conflict, the Vietnam Conflict, and the Gulf War, Masonic records, civic & social club records, personal scrapbooks, store ledgers, church records, and microfilm collections.
The following counties can be researched in the archives:
Baldwin, Butts, Jasper, Jones, Lamar, Monroe, Pike, Putnam, Spalding, Upson, and Warren
The museum houses artifacts that have been collected from the following areas:
Barnesville, Milner, and the surrounding districts within Lamar County
Our collection policy is limited in scope to Lamar County. We have textiles, furniture, agricultural items, printing press items, fire department items including the original 1927 LaFrance fire engine and 1900 brass fire bell, buggy company artifacts, Barnesville bottles including soda drinks and medicine bottles, and horse-drawn vehicles which were made in the buggy factories that were here in Barnesville.