There were two homes where Jimmy Carter spent much of his life after he returned to Georgia: The humble ranch in his hometown Plains and the efficient office-turned-apartment at the Carter Center in Atlanta.
But Carter had a third place in Georgia where he also spent significant time after he lost his White House reelection bid, a rustic mountain cabin near Ellijay where he sought refuge in the solitude of the forest.
Now one of the most conservative enclaves in Georgia, Carter wrote several of the 32 books he authored at his log-cabin home along Turniptown Creek in the rugged landscape of Gilmer County.
To this day, it’s hard to find a longtime Ellijay resident who doesn’t have a fond memory of the Democrat, whose funeral procession ends this week in Plains after a dayslong celebration of his life and legacy.
Some evoke memories of meeting him in their childhood, others of building surprisingly close friendships with the former president and his wife Rosalynn during their many sojourns to their mountain retreat.
“I remember the first time I was invited to have dinner with them in the early 1980s,” Melinda Hadden told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I remember thinking what do you say to a former president? But he made me so comfortable. It was like sitting and talking with a friend.”
Hadden’s father, James “Bud” Holloway, was a local Democratic heavyweight who owned the Pink Pig barbecue joint where Carter often dined. She recently recounted the story of how Carter wound up in Ellijay, a quiet community where forking rivers merge.
Her father not only was a restaurateur, he was also an expert in dynamiting winding roads for local timber farmers out of craggy rock.
That’s how he connected with John Pope, an Americus developer who needed help carving out a path to a quiet 20-acre ridgeline refuge with sweeping vistas. He called it Walnut Mountain and sold property to the Carters in the early 1980s. They named a nearby gusher Rosalynn Falls after the former president’s wife.
Credit: AJC file
Credit: AJC file
The Carters went there for an escape, often hiking nearby mountain trails and fly-fishing the stream’s plentiful rainbow trout from his pine board front porch.
But he didn’t exactly keep a low profile. Locals knew the Carters were in town whenever they’d see the swarming black cars of his Secret Service detail, and he wasn’t shy about making new friends.
Joe Sisson still remembers the day about 30 years ago when the telephone rang. The former president was on the line and he wanted to know if Sisson and his wife JoAnn were busy that night. If not, he said, he would like to “share a tomato sandwich and a visit.”
Sisson, now 80, remembers it felt serendipitous that the power to his home — knocked out during a storm earlier that day — was restored just as the Carters pulled up at his house.
“As the evening wore on,” Sisson said, “both he and Rosalynn told so many interesting stories I cannot remember them all.”
Over the years, they kept up their special friendship. And Sisson always made clear that the two had a standing offer of a tomato sandwich at his place.
Eric Hamilton remembers driving by the Carters during an afternoon walk through the woods. His grandfather “bravely slowed the car” and rolled down the window to greet the couple under the watchful eye of Secret Service officers.
Wally Stover Sr., who helped build Carter’s cabin, said they became “genuine” friends over the decades.
He traveled with Carter around the nation to build houses for Habitat for Humanity. They worshipped together at a local church. And one winter Sunday, Carter came to his house to watch the Super Bowl.
“He was really a regular guy,” Stover said. “That’s always been one of his strengths.”
The house, recently assessed by county officials at $450,000, is hardly ostentatious: A one-bedroom place with a sleeping loft on the upper level.
When a Washington Post reporter visited in 1988, there were four identical rocking chairs out front, each topped by seat cushions with identical stitching. Inside, there were six chairs situated around a wooden dining room table, fronted by six fastidiously arranged place mats.
“Not a bad way to spend a retirement,” Carter told the reporter, adding that it helped keep him connected with the “same experiences, the same sensations” he felt as a child wandering the towering forests near his Plains home.
As his illness advanced, Carter spent less time in Gilmer County. But his kids and grandkids now enjoy its solitude, and Stover said it’s a “point of pride” for the community that the Carter family planted deep roots in the north Georgia mountains.
“He’s greater in every way than the people he walked among,” said Stover, “but he never made any of us feel that way.”
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