For thousands of years, this area of what is now defined as west central Georgia was occupied by cultures of indigenous peoples.

The land for Lee, Muscogee, Troup, Coweta, and Carroll counties was ceded by the Creek to the United States in the 1825 Treaty of Indian Springs.

On September 8, 1940, 16-year-old Austin Callaway, a black youth, was arrested in LaGrange as a suspect in an attack on a white woman.

The next night a small, armed group of white men took him from the county jail, driving him out to the nearby countryside, where they lynched him: shooting him several times and leaving him for dead.

In 2017 a man who was a child at the time revealed that his white family found and took Callaway to the hospital, where he died the next day.

In response, that fall African Americans organized the first NAACP chapter in Troup County at Warren Temple Methodist Church in LaGrange.

Four days later Gilbert was dead, shot while held in jail by the Harris County Sheriff, in what he said was self-defense.

The county has acquired other industry, notably auto parts manufacturers who support the nearby Kia Motors plant.

Also in the area are West Point Lake and Callaway Gardens, which attract tourists and visitors as top recreation destinations in the state.

On January 25, 2017, Mayor Jim Thornton and Police Chief Louis M. Dekmar, of the county seat of LaGrange, publicly apologized to more than 200 people gathered for a reconciliation service at Warren Temple United Methodist Church for the police's failure decades before to protect Callaway, saying: "I sincerely regret and denounce the role our Police Department played in Austin's lynching, both through our action and our inaction," Chief Dekmar told a crowd at a traditionally African-American church.

"[10]Residents organized Troup Together, a grassroots group to acknowledge lynchings, commemorate the victims, and work on racial reconciliation.