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Editor’s Note: This feature originally ran on February 22, 2025 in the 2025 Progress edition (Troup County Is…). The Progress edition is a publication produced annually by the LaGrange Daily News. If you would like to pick up a copy of the 2025 Progress edition, please visit our office at 115 Broad Ste 101.

Having been brought here as a toddler in the late 1970s, Lewis Powell has been a LaGrange resident nearly his entire life. His mother is originally from Greenville and his father is from Newnan, so the family has been in West Georgia even longer.

As a research archivist at the Troup County Archives Powell has been a friend to both historians and college students alike. Still, most folks around LaGrange are likely familiar with him from his spooky tours of the city.

Powell didn’t start out looking to be a researcher. With a degree in theater, his long and winding path to the Archives took his career in many directions but it worked out in the end.

“While I was in school, I was asked if I wanted a job with the university archives, and that was at Columbus State and I ended up getting a student assistant position there and working there from my sophomore year until I graduated. I really kind of fell in love with Archives and History, and then once I graduated, I worked a variety of different jobs,” Powell said.

It wasn’t actually Powell’s archiving experience that put him on the radar for the Archives. Troup County Archives Director Shannon Gavin Johnson had him doing ghost tours first.

“When Shannon found out that I had an interest in southern ghost lore, which has always kind of been a hobby, she decided to ask if I would create a ghost tour for downtown LaGrange. I created and began giving the Strange LaGrange tour. After they realized I came with archival skills and knowledge, and I have a good knowledge of history, I ended up getting hired on part-time, and eventually full-time, and into this position where I am today, which is the research archivist,” Powell said.

Powell said as a research archivist, he helps with research requests coming in and helps people find the information they need, whether that be genealogy, history or local lore.

“I also do a lot of writing and research into local history because of this position. But it’s a really fun position. I get to not only deal with local history, but I get to deal with genealogy and trying to help people answer their genealogical questions, or even sometimes just getting started on their family tree,” he said.

Powell said he helps students, but these days most of the people looking for help at the Archives are researching their family history or local history.

“We very frequently will get genealogists from out of town, people whose ancestors pass through Troup County at some point,” Powell said. “We’ve had people from all over the country in here to see what resources we can provide them. We have some resources that are not available online, and those things we can provide them with to give them clues into their genealogy.”

For Powell, helping people research their family tree is fun but he really enjoys giving the ghost tours because it’s also a hobby.

“In general, I just love giving tours and helping people find the information that they’re looking for. We had a garden club in here yesterday, and I was able to pull out all of these old scrapbooks for them. The members of the garden club went through the scrapbooks, and they kept finding themselves in the pictures, but we also gave them a tour of the archives, so they got to kind of see how we operate, and see some of the storage spaces that we have.”

“The Archives offers a much more personal look into history than anything you can find online,” Powell said.

“To be able to actually hold the document in your hand, especially if you have, say, a marriage certificate from your ancestors, being able to hold that physical certificate, something that their ancestors may have signed or may have held themselves, is very special. It’s seeing these items in context. If we have a bound record, a deed, for instance, you can see the deed bound with all of these other deeds,” he said.

Powell said he got his love of history from his grandfather, John Holiday, Sr. Holiday was on the school board and wrote a column for the Meriweather Vindicator, writing articles about local and state politics.

“He was a historian in Greenville, and he wrote for the local newspaper, wrote about history and also about politics. I would spend hours going into his office, and these pictures hung in his office.  He had fully explored the family tree and wrote a number of books about the family, and so he would tell me about the family. I would look through the books. I was just utterly fascinated,” said Powell.

“He also had a marvelous library, and I would go to their house and immediately go, start looking at books, start pulling stuff off of shelves, and then eventually I would beg my parents, can I borrow some books, please? And eventually, I grew my own library. And so it was just always this fascination of seeing my own family engaged in writing and research and historical research, and people taking me out to explore different places, that all contributed to this love of history,” he said.

Powell said he got into ghost lore because he genuinely believes he had a ghost experience.

“When I first moved here, I was very young, and I was getting in bed one night, and I pulled up the covers. I was sliding my feet underneath the covers. My left foot came into contact with another foot, the bottom of my foot was touching the bottom of this other foot, and it was cold and clammy. I freaked out, jumped out of bed, ran into my parent’s room, and begged them to let me stay the night with them,” Powell said.

His dad took him back to the bedroom and pulled the covers back, and of course there was nothing there, he said. 

“It was that experience that kind of piqued my interest. For me, it’s the juncture of history and mystery, this idea that people who are long dead are still possibly around,” Powell said.

“We had an investigation in [The Archives] building, and we believe that we may have had a conversation with Hatton Lovejoy, who used to work in this building. This person identified himself as Hatton Lovejoy, and we were able to ask some really interesting questions and got some interesting responses. It’s that idea that you have this history, but there is this kind of mysterious force around it, and that’s what I love,” Powell said.

Powell gave the first ghost tour in June of 2019, taking people through downtown and to the college. He later began doing a Halloween cemetery tour as well.

“That is a different type of tour. Those tours are more or less based on ghost stories and the paranormal and more just creepy history,” he said.

Possibly because of the time of year, or the location, the cemetery tours have been very popular.

“We’re looking at doing another tour in the cemetery, because that first cemetery tour just totally sold out,” he said.