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 the 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.
This facility has a dual purpose; one of museum and another of genealogical research. The archives processes dozens of requests for research each month. There is no charge for research and it is through donations for research that the facility supported financially.
The following categories can be found in the archives:
family files, courthouse records, obituaries, marriages, passports through the Indian Nations, Federal Census 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.
