Philip Kurland, the longtime owner of the Plains Trading Post on Main Street, stands amid a sea of pins and memorabilia. Plains, Georgia, is the hometown of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who was buried there Thursday. (Matthew Pearson/WABE)
Mike Derer / Mike Derer
PLAINS, Ga. – When Jimmy Carter left this whistle-stop farm town for college in 1942, he did not have plans to return. As a boy, Carter had dreamed of joining the Navy. He wanted to see the world.
And over the course of a century, he did. After his graduation from the U.S. Naval Academy, Carter served aboard a submarine stationed in Pearl Harbor. In Iowa diners and New Hampshire town halls, Carter pitched his improbable bid for the presidency. From the White House, he shuttled between Cairo and Jerusalem to hold together a historic peace agreement between Israel and Egypt.
He accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, built homes with Habitat for Humanity in Haiti, assisted with public health campaigns in Ghana and monitored elections in Panama.
But Plains, a community of a few hundred with no stoplight, supermarket or gas station, kept tugging Carter back. And on Thursday, the man from Plains made a final trip home, so he could be buried near the modest ranch house he shared with his wife, Rosalynn, for more than six decades.
A condolence book and cotton wreath sits in a tent on former President Jimmy Carter’s boyhood farm in Archery, Ga on Wednesday, January 9, 2025. (Matthew Pearson/WABE)
“Yes, they spent four years in the governor’s mansion and four years in the White House, but the other 92 years they spent at home in Plains, Georgia,” said grandson Jason Carter during a Thursday morning service filled with former presidents and other dignitaries at the National Cathedral in Washington.
On a crisp, but bright, winter afternoon, the motorcade carrying this town’s most famous resident passed through the tiny strip of Main Street for the last time. Friends, neighbors and visitors lined the route, waving American flags as a military flyover thundered overhead.
Sonia Galloway met Carter once when he helped Habitat for Humanity build her new home in nearby Americus, but says he felt like a friend.
“It’s like he was family to every one of us in Americus and Plains,” Galloway said.
Much of Jimmy Carter’s Plains is now cared for by the National Park Service — and has been for years since the National Park Service created the Jimmy Carter National Historic Site in the late eighties. The farm where Carter grew up outside town is frozen in the Great Depression, with a car battery-powered radio in the living room and a suspended metal bucket for a showerhead. At Plains High School, now the park headquarters, time stands still in a preserved classroom from the 1930s.
Downtown, the train depot that served as headquarters for Carter’s presidential campaigns is still wrapped in signs that declare in retro front, “Jimmy Carter for President.”
The sun begins to set behind the presidential campaign headquaters of former President Jimmy Carter in his hometown of Plains, Ga. (Matthew Pearson/WABE)
Across the street, the longest-running shop sells political memorabilia from campaigns long suspended.
But for the last four decades at least, the Carters were not just distant historical figures.
“He’s our neighbor,” says Philip Kurland, the longtime owner of the Plains Trading Post on Main Street. “He’s the one that prays with us. He’s the one that shows up at every meeting.”
Philip Kurland, the longtime owner of the Plains Trading Post on Main Street, stands amid a sea of pins and memorabilia from past campaigns. (Matthew Pearson/WABE)
At the trading post, where political enthusiasts can shop a sea of pins and memorabilia from campaigns long suspended, Kurland says it’s been jarring to watch politicians on TV claiming to really know Carter.
“We’re saying to ourselves, you might know the political Jimmy Carter, but we know the real Jimmy Carter,” he said.
Kurland thinks visitors will keep making the trek to this corner of Southwest Georgia.
“His spirit will always be here,” Kurland said. “He is our hero. Rosalynn, too. But let’s just face it, it’s just not going to be the same.”
“The Carters are Plains, and Plains is the Carters,” said Jennifer Hopkins, lead education ranger at what today is known as the Jimmy Carter National Historical Park.
Jennifer Hopkins, lead education ranger at what today is known as the Jimmy Carter National Historical Park. (Matthew Pearson/WABE)
At Carter’s boyhood farm, Hopkins says the park service has been in the unique position of interpreting history while the main character was not only still living, but right nearby.
“It’s definitely surreal,” Hopkins said. “The previous park I worked at, there were times I thought, if I could only talk to this person about what they wrote to figure out, ‘What did you really mean?’ For so long we’ve had that access.”
For Hopkins, the last week has been kind of like having a death in the family. There is the initial shock, then running around to prepare.
“And then once those visitors go away and you have this moment of quiet, that’s when it truly sinks in and you have to take a pause,” she said. “You feel a little lost, but then after that, that’s when our training comes into play.”
After a service at Maranatha Baptist Church, the congregation where Carter taught Sunday school for many years, the former president was buried near the only home he ever owned — a home that will one day open to the public.
Downtown Plains, Ga on Wednesday, January 8, 2025. (Matthew Pearson/WABE)
