Carter’s Georgia hometown of Plains keeps vigil
PLAINS, Ga. — Jimmy Carter has always come home to Plains.
After leaving the Navy in 1953, he returned to Plains, the tiny Georgia town where he was raised, and where he eventually started the political career that would lead him to the presidency. Years later, he found in Plains a haven where he could reinvent himself after a stinging defeat that ousted him from the White House. And more recently, it was a place to heal, as he weathered severe health setbacks.
Now, Mr. Carter, 98, has come back to Plains once again, drawn by the comforts of home and the embrace of a community that he has cherished and relied upon through every chapter of his life, including what now appears to be his last.
On Saturday, his representatives said that after several short hospital visits, Mr. Carter entered hospice care in the home just off Main Street that he has shared with his wife, Rosalynn, for decades.
The residents of Plains have been keeping vigil, navigating a wait that is both somber and, in many ways, surreal, as news cameras pour into town and residents go about their lives.
“People ask me all the time: ‘How is he doing?’” said Marvin Laster, the former chief executive of the Boys & Girls Club in nearby Albany, Ga., who befriended Mr. Carter while working with him at the organization’s outpost in Plains. “He’s good with the spirit and he’s strong in his faith, and that’s all that matters.”
Mr. Carter is known by his neighbors as Mr. Jimmy, a familiar face from community gatherings or the Sunday school lessons he taught up until a few years ago. About 550 people live in Plains, and Sumter County, which includes Plains, is one of the few rural areas in Georgia where Democrats have had a slight advantage in recent presidential elections.
The appeal of Plains, Mr. Carter has said, was its promise of the kind of humble, small-town existence he desired after the presidency. In fact, the only disagreement that Mr. Laster remembered having with Mr. Carter was over the name of the Boys & Girls Club in Plains, which is officially called the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter unit: Mr. Carter raised a motion to strip his and his wife’s names from it, but Mr. Laster and other board members voted no.
As much as Mr. Carter wanted a semblance of a regular life, the result of his living in Plains turned it into no ordinary town. The signs marking town limits boast that Plains is home to the 39th president. The farm where he was raised just outside of town is a National Park. His modest house is surrounded by black security fencing and guard posts.
Other small towns in this part of Georgia, linked together in a constellation of country roads, have withered or have streets lined with fast-food joints and convenience stores. The center of Plains has a cafe and a row of gift shops that bustle with tourists.
Without Mr. Carter, “you wouldn’t have the downtown atmosphere that you have,” said Jeff Clements, an owner of the Buffalo Peanut Company, a commercial peanut sheller and seed treater that owns what was once the Carter family’s warehouse.