PLAINES, Ga. – Jimmy Carter’s roots in Plains, Georgia, ran deep. It’s where he came into this world and he spent his formative years. The tiny farming community helped shape his values and were his refuge throughout his long life.
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“My daddy believed in everyone on the farm doing their share,” Carter said -- his voice playing as people tour his boyhood home, now a National Historic Park. “Here, in the backyard, we had chickens and ducks and guinea hens and geese that we had to feed.”
The Carter family farm, in the tiny community of Archer just outside Plains, is a living museum and now part of the Jimmy Carter National Historic Park. Caretakers still grow a variety of crops, including the peanuts that became synonymous with Carter, in the red clay soil.
As a boy, Carter had many daily chores, including helping to run the farm commissary store, steps from the family farmhouse. During certain seasons, he worked the fields alongside Black farmhands, many of whom lived on the farm.
“He wasn’t poor, but his father always had him work at harvest time,” said Steven Hochman, research director of The Carter Center.
When Carter left the White House after four years, he hired Hochman to help him assemble his memoirs. Hochman went on to become the first employee of the former president’s foundation, The Carter Center, and researcher on several of the former president’s nearly three dozen books.
“He had experiences with every kind of person in Plains. This is one of the advantages of growing up in a small town,” Hochman said. “President Carter knew every kind of person in Plains. He knew the poorest people, white and Black. He knew illiterate people. He also knew the best-educated people, the physicians, the people with graduate training.”
Carter’s comfort level with all those around him became an attribute that was key to his success throughout his life.
“When he goes into a country in Africa, he’s very comfortable going and talking to the prime minister, to the president, to the foreign minister, but he’s also comfortable going out into the villages and talking to the poorest people,” Hochman said.
He forged a powerful bond with Jack Clark, the foreman of the farmhands, and his wife, Rachel, who lived in one of the simple wood structures provided to Carter’s workers.
In Carter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood,” he wrote: “Except in my own room, this is where I felt most at home.”
With his father running a farm and other businesses and his mother, a nurse, working out of the home, it was the Clarks that helped teach Carter the importance of faith, family and fishing.
And hard work.
After long hours in the fields, they would take long walks and talk about the Scriptures, values and the meaning of life.
“His mother, Miss Lillian Carter, she was often gone because she was a practicing nurse. He would be with Rachel,” Hochman said. “He gives her great credit for teaching him about numerous things.”
In 1941, Jimmy Carter became the first person from his father’s side of the family to graduate from high school.
Carter studied engineering at Georgia Southwestern Junior College before joining the Naval ROTC program to continue his engineering studies at Georgia Institute of Technology.
After he received an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy, he married Rosalynn Smith, also from Plains, and took her along as he began his career as a naval officer, working on nuclear submarines.
The young family’s plans suddenly changed when Carter’s father died in 1953. Carter resigned his Navy commission to return home and take over the family business. Rosalynn Carter learned to do the farm’s books. It was a rough transition from the life they had known.
They survived, then thrived. Carter became a community leader, served on the school board and was elected to the Georgia Senate in 1962. He ran for governor in 1966 and lost. He ran again in 1968 and won.
During his second term, he became active in national politics. In January 1976, he launched his campaign for president.
Legacy and loyalty
At what is now a historic inn in downtown Plains, friends of the Carters gather regularly to share stories about the town’s most celebrated citizens. The Carters even dropped in from time to time.
Some even say Jimmy Carter’s life started there.
Owner Jill Stuckey said the inn was a boarding house in the early 1920s, when Carter’s parents got married and lived at a Plains rooming house. There, Lillian Carter became pregnant with their first child, to be named Jimmy.
“Depending on when you feel life begins, President Carter lived here the first six months of his life,” Stuckey said, standing outside what the inn now calls “The Conception Room.”
Just across the railroad tracks from the inn is Plains’ old train station, now preserved by the National Park Service as the Carter presidential campaign headquarters.
It’s where he launched his 1976 bid for the White House, where his supporters gathered around a black-and-white television to watch the returns come in that November and where the Peanut Brigade left two months later, rolling up on the tracks to Washington, D.C.
Plains is no longer the booming farming community it was when Carter grew up, married, ran the family business and launched a political career. Residents still living there say it would be a ghost town if it weren’t for the Carters’ legacy. Some worry that still might end when the Carters are gone.
“Even in their passing, they are thinking of Plains because they are going to be buried here,” Stuckey said.
While the Carter Presidential Library and The Carter Center share a wooded campus in downtown Atlanta and his military and government service would entitle them to be buried in a place of honor at a national cemetery, the Carters will be buried in their hometown. That, along with the farm and museum, will ensure that their Plains will not be forgotten.
“So, not only in life, but in their death, they are thinking about their hometown,” Stuckey said.