“President Carter will always live in Plains,” Philip Kurland told AFP. In this town in the state of Georgia, in the south-east of the United States, there is only Jimmy Carter that the inhabitants cherish more than peanuts.
The 98-year-old former US president, now in palliative care at home, has made this small rural town, of which he is a native, famous.
Tourists and swarms of journalists have swept there according to his accomplishments, in particular when he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, or during visits from high dignitaries like Joe Biden.
“It’s important to know how involved he was in local life – you couldn’t go to a meeting without him or Rosalynn being involved,” says Mr. Kurland behind the counter of his gift shop, about Jimmy Carter and his wife.
Right in the center of the town of 600 people, this shop is in a building that once belonged to an uncle of Jimmy Carter.
In Plains, in the heart of the American peanut belt, visitors can enjoy peanut ice cream before discovering fields of this traditional crop as far as the eye can see, along dusty roads.
But it is above all the former Democratic leader who makes Plains famous.
The oldest surviving American president is present everywhere: from the sign that welcomes visitors to the city of “our 39th president of the United States”, to the peanut farm of his childhood, to his old high school. , two places managed by the US National Park Service.
Just like the small railway depot that served as headquarters for his 1976 presidential campaign.
The modest residence of the Carters is only a two-minute drive from the center, but a solid fence and agents from the Secret Service, which protects high American personalities, keep onlookers at bay. It, too, was bequeathed to the National Parks Service, and it is there that the President and his wife will be buried.
Around the corner, under the much less touristy Dollar General, locals are doing their shopping, as the Carter couple sometimes used to do.
Kelvin Sims once overheard them having fun quibbling over canned tuna. “He was coming into the neighborhood, he was telling the Secret Service to stay back,” said the 47-year-old man, outside the brick store, near a propane tank, his black Chevrolet in the background.
“I consider him a friend because that’s what he gave off to people,” he says of Jimmy Carter. He also mentions that his grandmother Rosa Brown looked after the Carters’ grandchildren.
As for the upcoming death of the child of the country: “We all know that day would come. It will come for everyone, but I did not think for Jimmy Carter (…) because he was our hero”, he said.
Jan Williams, friend of the former president, knew him when she was the teacher of her daughter Amy in CM1 in 1976.
More recently, she helped contain the crowds that flocked to watch Jimmy Carter teach catechism on Sundays at the small Maranatha Baptist Church, even after he turned 90.
The red-brick building with a white steeple stands near several rows of pecan trees on a road leading out of Plains.
Jimmy Carter was very clear with the fact “that he was ready to leave this world”, reports to AFP, Jan Williams, in front of the church.
“Palliative care is a scary term, it’s almost the equivalent of the word death. And it’s not yet,” she adds, saying that the man who has already overcome brain cancer over 90 will still be around for a while.
A few steps from the Maranatha Baptist Church, on a patch of grass near a gas station, sits a four-meter-tall peanut statue, installed after a Carter campaign event in 1976.
She presents a broad smile, which resembles that of Jimmy Carter. At his feet a bouquet of pink flowers was already placed on Tuesday.
02/22/2023 05:53:25 – Plains (United States) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
