The Georgia town known first and foremost as the home of Jimmy Carter had steeled itself time and again for an existence without him. First, there was his cancer diagnosis in 2015, and then the fall that broke a hip, and the disclosure almost two years ago that he had entered hospice care.
But sure enough, every time, he held on.
And so, Plains, a speck of a community tied to the 39th president for the better part of a century, awoke on Monday to a reality that, strangely enough, seemed almost as inconceivable as it was inevitable. Mr. Carter, 100, was gone. He died on Sunday at his home, the modest ranch house hidden behind the security fencing and guard stations in the center of town.
“Honestly, it doesn’t seem real,” said Philip Kurland, the owner of the Plains Trading Post, an overstuffed emporium of political memorabilia in the strip of business that makes up downtown. “It was inevitable, but there’s still sadness. There’s also a feeling of: Let’s celebrate a life well lived.”
In a serendipitous twist, Mr. Kurland said, he made the purple button that he was wearing to memorialize Mr. Carter just last week. “I can’t tell you why,” he said. Perhaps, it was a premonition, he added. It was also a reflection of how the 500 or so residents of Plains went about life for years knowing this moment would come, sooner or later.
The red, white and blue bows that replaced the town’s holiday decorations on Monday were made months ago. “It’s been something the town has been preparing for,” said Kelly Kight, who owns a floral shop.
Mr. Carter’s longevity, resilience and prominence might have been unique, but his death came with a runway of grief that is familiar to many who have been the caregivers and loved ones of those whose demise came after a long decline.
“It did kind of soften the blow,” said Marvin Laster, former chief executive of the local Boys and Girls Club, which named its Plains outpost after the Carters to the chagrin of the former president who found the recognition excessive. .
But only so much, he added.
“This kind of hits like an iron fist in a velvet glove,” Mr. Laster said. “The velvet glove was: You knew all was well with him.”
In and around Plains, that was the common response: sorrow over the loss for themselves and for their community, but not so much for him. Here, where faith for many is deep and defining, there was little doubt that he had transitioned to his eternal reward. That included a reunion with Rosalynn Carter, his wife of 77 years, who died in 2023. The editorial cartoon published on Sunday by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution depicted Mrs. Carter greeting her husband at the gates of heaven.
“That gave me a bit of — I would not call it joy, I would call it comfort,” Mr. Laster said. “He had served well and done all he could do on this side.”
Plains is a hard place to reach by accident. The dot of a town is accessible only by a scribble of country roads etched through woods and farmland. The odds are high that any outsider who makes the trek, about three hours south of Atlanta, was there because of Mr. Carter.
Plenty of small towns are the birthplace of someone deemed significant enough to merit a placard on the main road. But often, the town’s part in the story faded out from there. After all, Elvis traded in Tupelo for Graceland, and Bill Clinton might have been the “man from Hope,” but he could just as well have billed himself as “the man from Hot Springs,” where his family moved when he was 7.
For Mr. Carter, Plains was something different entirely. He kept coming back — after his time in the Navy, after losing the presidency, after his post-presidential travels that took him all over the world.
The town and the people in it — almost all of them relatives and friends — offered a tether to a life that might have been his if not for all the things he did beyond Sumter County. He was actively and deeply engaged in the operation of the local Boys and Girls Club. He mowed the lawn at Maranatha Baptist Church. He had friends and neighbors over for dinner, and he and his wife would open the door themselves for the guests who walked over.
Dexter Macklin, a cook at the nursing home named for Mr. Carter’s mother, Lillian Carter, lived next to one of the former president’s childhood friends and remembered Secret Service agents coming over at Christmastime carrying presents. “He was a good, genuine person,” Mr. Macklin said.
As much as Mr. Carter seemed to crave a semblance of humble small-town normalcy, the presence of a president meant that Plains could never be like any other Georgia farm town. Over time, other towns withered or grew big enough to sustain a Walmart and drive-throughs. Plains could feel encased in amber, a living museum to its most famous son.
As a result, people living in that environment became accustomed to quirks and complications that their neighbors in Richland or Americus never had to contend with.
Those circumstances included days like Monday, as journalists from Atlanta, Washington, New York — and even farther away — swooped in. Local residents were asked to recount their stories about “Mr. Jimmy,” as others in town sometimes called him, and to distill what he meant to their town and, indeed, the nation. At Buffalo Peanut Company, workers fell behind on shelling, thanks to the onslaught of strangers wielding microphones and notepads.
Walter McPherson pointed to a patch of pavement where a television truck was parked. “Used to be, you’d see an old dog laying here,” Walter McPherson, 68, said as he sat on a swing downtown, recalling a time when virtually no one identified Plains as Jimmy Carter’s hometown. “Almost overnight, this town got crowded.”
Mr. Carter was the first president he voted for. “He made me proud to be a Georgian,” he said, praising the former president as “a man of high character.”
He did not fault the outsiders pouring into town. He might have grown up about 15 miles away, but he was an outsider now, too. He drove in on Monday from just over the Alabama state line, where he lived now. “I just felt like I needed to be here,” he said.
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