PLAINS — Mourners woke up early here in southwest Georgia on Saturday, braving the morning chill as they began to bid farewell to their beloved Jimmy Carter.
But the mood in the former president’s rural hometown wasn’t one of sorrow or grief. Rather, there was a sense of overwhelming gratitude for all that the peanut farmer-turned-commander in chief accomplished during his century on earth.
Plains native Jonathan Gibson and his wife, Kelly, found a spot along the funeral procession route with their three children. They arrived about 8 a.m., nearly three hours before Carter’s hearse rolled through town.
“He meant a lot of things to a lot of people,” said Gibson, who works as an insurance agent. “For me, he was like the last human politician, the last person who had grace and compassion. Politics is so different today.”
The six-day funeral procession will take Carter’s remains from southwest Georgia to Atlanta and Washington, D.C. The procession will return to Plains for a private burial Thursday, when the former president will be interred next to Rosalynn Carter, his wife of 77 years, who died in November 2023.
Carter, who lived longer than any other president, died Sunday after celebrating his 100th birthday in October.
The nearly weeklong funeral procession will pay tribute to the various stages of Carter’s life, from Navy shipman and peanut farmer to state senator, Georgia governor, U.S. president and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, and his efforts to promote human rights and cure diseases through the nonprofit Carter Center.
A motorcade carrying the former president’s remains departed Americus shortly after 10:30 a.m. from Phoebe Sumter Medical Center, the large regional hospital near Plains. It is where Carter made his final hospital visits before entering home hospice care in February 2023, and where the funeral procession for the former first lady also began.
The former president’s casket was carried from the hospital to a hearse by Secret Service special agents who served Carter for more than 40 years. His remains are being accompanied during the procession by more than 30 family members, including his four children, Jack, Chip, Jeff and Amy, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
The crowd hushed outside the hospital as the motorcade arrived. Most people held American flags distributed by the medical center’s staff. Flags, cameras and cellphones were raised high as the motorcade began its slow roll away from the hospital toward Plains.
Earlier, a steady stream of cars trickled into the pecan grove in front of Phoebe Sumter that served as a parking lot. Mourners of all ages stepped out into near-freezing temperatures and pulled on their coats under a clear sky and bright winter sun.
Signs of the coming presidential funeral procession were easy to see around Americus: Police cars and Georgia State Patrol cruisers dotted nearly every parking lot and gas station approaching the medical center, and the occasional helicopter buzzed overhead. Near downtown, the sign outside a Dairy Queen read, “Praying for the Carter family.”
Many in the crowd had a personal connection to the Carter family. Bobbie Little, a Plains native, said she went to school with Jimmy Carter’s children, nieces and nephews. Her mother, Rachel Clark, worked for Carter’s parents on his family’s farm and helped care for Carter when he was a boy.
Little shared a story about how Carter helped her niece, who had a disability, get assistance when they had nowhere else to turn. Carter’s Habitat for Humanity crew built Little’s niece a wheelchair ramp at her home, Little said, and the Carters were involved with the woman’s care until she died.
Little had a message to share with the Carter family: “He’s resting now,” she said. “He lived a full life. I know you miss him, but you’ve got to hold onto all the memories.”
In Plains, Kelly Gibson, who grew up in nearby Ellaville, said Carter’s niece was her high school English teacher.
“We read a couple of Jimmy’s books. Around here, you start really early,” she laughed. “The community is Jimmy. They act like he did. They try to love everybody and help everybody … I think if you grow up around here you kind of have to love Jimmy.”
The procession stopped at the Jimmy Carter Boyhood Farm, part of the Jimmy Carter National Historical Park in Plains. Carter’s parents settled the farm in 1928, when he was 4 years old, and he lived there until he went to college and joined the Navy. The family grew peanuts, cotton and sugar cane.
Park staff rang the farm bell 39 times, a nod to the 39th president. In his book about growing up on the farm, “An Hour Before Daylight,” Carter recounted how the bell would wake up the family to tend to livestock. In 2003, Carter made a painting of the bell and the painting now hangs at the Carter Center, the nonprofit he cofounded with his wife after leaving the White House.
The crowd in Plains stayed silent as the hearse carrying Carter’s flag-draped casket passed through his beloved hometown, about a 3-hour drive south of Atlanta.
The motorcade then headed north. It slowed down as it passed through the Georgia towns of Preston, Ellaville, Butler, Reynolds and Fort Valley, so that mourners could pay their respects on the sides of the road.
Then it continued to Atlanta, where it paused a little after 3 p.m. at the Georgia State Capitol, before proceeding to the Carter Presidential Center, where the former president will lie in repose. Mourners can pay their respects from Saturday night until Tuesday morning.
The funeral procession has been in planning since 1986, five years after Carter left the White House. Organizers of the funeral procession once envisioned his remains being transported by train, an idea scrapped at Carter’s behest.
On Tuesday morning, the funeral motorcade departs from the Carter Presidential Center for Dobbins Air Reserve Base. From there, Carter’s remains will be flown to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. A horse drawn caisson will bring the former president to the U.S. Capitol, where members of Congress will pay their respects and Carter will lie in state.
The funeral procession will depart Thursday morning for the Washington National Cathedral, where a national funeral service will be held. President Joe Biden, whose relationship with Carter goes back decades, will be among the speakers.
Carter’s remains will then be flown back to Georgia. That afternoon in Plains, a private funeral service will be held at Maranatha Baptist Church, where the former president taught Sunday school for many years. Carter will then be interred next to the former first lady in front of the ranch house they lived in together for six decades.
By 10 a.m. on Saturday, the crowd in downtown Plains swelled into the hundreds as people young and old lined the main thoroughfare of this tiny town to pay tribute to Georgia’s only president.
Flower bouquets and handwritten notes were placed at the base of a marble monument honoring Carter’s legacy. Atop the marker sat two blue Habitat for Humanity hard hats on which mourners scrawled well-wishes and notes thanking Carter for his decades of service.
“Mr. President, thank you for promoting peace,” one person wrote.
It wasn’t just locals who lined up in Plains to pay their respects early Saturday. John and Maria Owen said they woke up in the middle of the night to make the 3 1/2-hour drive from Canton.
She called Carter a “good man.” Like several others along the procession route, she said that sense of empathy embodied by Carter is largely missing from modern politics. “He loved people,” she said. “Every choice he made was about loving people.”
Among those waiting along the road was 12-year-old Will Porter Shelbrock, who convinced his grandparents to bring him to Plains from Gainesville, Florida, so they could see Carter off.
He and his grandmother held up handmade posters. “Thank you, Jimmy Carter,” he had written in marker, along with a drawing of Georgia’s flag and an outline of the Peach State.
“He lived a life of service,” Porter Shelbrock said. “He was building homes and doing humanitarian stuff in his 90s. He’s done so much for Georgia, the country and the entire world.”
His grandmother, Susan Cone, beamed as she looked on. Not many 12-year-olds would insist on traveling to another state so they could pay their respects to a former president, she said.
Farther north, along the dozen miles or so from Fort Valley in the heart of Georgia peach country to Byron along I-75, police cars and fire trucks were stationed at almost every intersection.
Near downtown Fort Valley, in the parking lot of a Family Dollar store, nearly 50 locals gathered to bid Carter farewell.
Ginette Trapp, 58, a schoolteacher, recalled visiting the White House as a sixth-grader at a school in Columbus while Carter was in office. She said he waved at her and her classmates. On Saturday, here she was to wave goodbye.
“I remember my parents and all the other adults talk about what a good person was and how historic it was that we had a president from Georgia,” Trapp said. “That resonated with me my entire life.”
Another woman on hand to watch the procession, Maryann Willis, referred to Carter as “a humble, Biblical person that came from nothing.” Willis, 64, who lives in nearby Roberta, said, “God saw fit to let him have something, but he didn’t let it take control of him.”
Seeing the motorcade cruise through, she said, would let her “know that’s a child of God going home.”
A little after 12:30 p.m., the procession passed through Fort Valley, continuing its journey to Atlanta.
By then, a small crowd had already gathered at the Georgia Capitol, nearly three hours before the motorcade arrived.
The hearse lingered at the state Capitol for a few minutes, pausing near the statue on the statehouse grounds that honors his legacy as the first Georgian to rise to the White House. Jack and Jason Carter — the former president’s son and grandson — briefly disembarked from the motorcade to greet Gov. Brian Kemp, Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and House Speaker Jon Burns with hugs and handshakes.
Behind them stood dozens of state officials and lawmakers who serve in the Capitol that launched Carter to national prominence. A few dozen well-wishers stood nearby, including members of a local Boy Scout troop that saluted the funeral procession as it made its way toward the Carter Presidential Center.
Atlantans and visitors from farther afield gathered early Saturday afternoon outside the center, a sprawling, wooded campus housing the nonprofit Carter Center and Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum. Public visitation begins at 7 p.m., and mourners can pay their respects through 6 a.m. Tuesday.
Bundled up in a black trench coat, Jackie Cunningham, 53, sat with her two children on a bench along Atlanta’s Beltline as she braved the cold and waited for the center to open its doors. The Texas native thought it well worth the 12-hour drive to Atlanta. “I have loved him my whole life.”
Cunningham recalled her dad taking her to the polling place at their Southern Baptist church in 1976 when she was five. “Look Bugs, here’s Carter’s name,” he said while circling the name on the presidential ballot. She also recalled wearing her sister’s Jimmy Carter T-shirt to kindergarten every day.
“I hope to get through tonight, but I will stay as long as I have to,” she said. “This is a once in a lifetime thing.”
Carter dedicated much of his post-White House years to the Carter Center, founded soon after he lost his 1980 reelection bid and was “involuntarily retired,” as he put it. He envisioned the nonprofit as an Atlanta-based “mini–Camp David” focused on resolving conflicts worldwide.
The Carter Center become active in more than 80 countries, helping steer peace talks, nearly eradicating Guinea worm in Africa and observing elections in more than three dozen countries. Those efforts contributed to Carter being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022.
A military ceremony greeted the funeral procession as it arrived at the center shortly before 4 p.m. The 282nd Army Band played “America the Beautiful” and “Be Thou My Vision” as Carter’s casket was carried inside, where family and luminaries gathered for a memorial service.
Participants laid wreaths decorated with 39 white roses. Bernstine Hollis, who joined Carter’s White House from Plains and was one of the first Carter Center employees, delivered a prayer. The Morehouse College Glee Club sang musical selections including “Strong to Save (The Navy Hymn),” “The Lord’s Prayer” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
On Tuesday morning, the procession will continue north to Washington, D.C. On Thursday, it will return to Plains.
--Reporters Ashley Ahn and Greg Bluestein in Atlanta contributed to this report.
