Folks in tiny town remember, celebrate and prepare to say goodbye to their friend, neighbor and last rural president

Michael Dominick paints the Smiling Peanut in Plains, Ga. The peanut was
presented to former peanut farmer Jimmy Carter during a campaign event
in Evansville, Ind., in 1976. (Photo by Matt McClain, The Washington Post)

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The 550 residents of Plains, Georgia, are preparing to say goodbye to one of their own, America’s last rural president. Jimmy Carter "could have moved anywhere after leaving the White House. He could have cashed in on six-figure speaking gigs that have piled wealth on his successors," report Danielle Paquette and Mary Jordan of The Washington Post. "Yet the onetime peanut farmer and engineer chose instead to embrace his modest roots, making him all the more beloved in Plains and all the harder to lose."

"To everyone in Plains, he’s 'Mr. Jimmy.' To the rest of the world, he’s 'President Carter' — the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who rocketed to unexpected political heights, installed the first solar panels on the White House, brokered a peace deal between Egypt and Israel, slammed into controversy with gas shortages and the Iran hostage crisis and lost his reelection race to Ronald Reagan before launching decades of humanitarian work," the Post reports.

Plains has kept alive the spirit of the farmer who was president in 1977-81. "Every three years for the last 20, Jimmy Carter’s hometown hired Michael Dominick, a local handyman, to repaint the famous 13-foot peanut from the 1976 campaign," Paquette and Jordan report. "When word broke Saturday that Carter opted to spend his final days in hospice care at home, Dominick rushed out to find a bucket of automotive paint in a shade called 'peanut,' so he could touch up the 'Smiling Peanut.'"

Enthusiasm for the Carters didn't stop with sprucing up a statute. "A red, white and blue banner greets visitors on Main Street: HOME OF JIMMY CARTER. The general store below it sells peanut ice cream, celebrating Carter’s agricultural background," Paquette and Jordan report. "Admirers cram into his former campaign headquarters, a defunct railroad depot turned tiny museum." It's usually closed on Mondays, but not this Monday, NPR reports.

A niece of Carter, LeAnne Smith, told the Post, “I don’t know any life without him. It’s just hard sitting and waiting . . . .You just want it to be peaceful.” Smith, 61, a retired middle-school teacher, "had been crying in bursts since she got the call days ago from another family member," the Post reports. "What he wanted now, Smith said, was to rest at the ranch house he built six decades ago with Rosalynn. Smith visited over the weekend with plates of butter beans and corn muffins. The mood was calm, she said. Carter was asleep, but, his children told her, he was still eating."

Larry Cook, a presidential historian and a longtime friend of the Carters, gave a Presidents' Day talk in Plains. He told the crowd, "To the world, he’s a former president. To many of us in this auditorium, he’s our friend. He’s our family. He’s a neighbor.” Jill Stuckey, superintendent of the National Park Service histotic site in Plains, told reporters, "The town means everything to Jimmy, and Jimmy means everything to the town."

Political-memorabilia retailer Philip Kurland recalled to Maya T. Prabhu of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution how the Carters welcomed him to town and the former president sat with Kurland for an hour when he was ill. “It hasn’t sunk in, but it feels like I’m losing part of me,” he said. When Carter is gone, “It’ll feel awkward and odd to me, anyway, for a while. But I think overall when that’s passed, I think there will be a feeling of joy because every time I think of him it’ll put a smile on my face.”