Jimmy Carter Boyhood Farm
402 Old Plains Hwy
Plains, GA
The Depression-era farm without electricity where a future president learned to work the land, restored to the year he left for the Navy.
Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, spent his boyhood on a farm in the countryside outside Plains, Georgia, and that farm has been restored by the National Park Service to look as it did in the 1930s, when he was growing up there. The Carters moved to the farm in 1928, when Jimmy was a small child, and it is where he learned the rhythms of rural life that shaped him.
The farm had no electricity for most of Carter's childhood, and life ran on hard work, wells and windmills, and the seasons of cotton and peanuts. Walking the restored house, barns, and fields, with the recorded voice of the president himself telling the story, gives a rare, intimate sense of how one of America's leaders was actually raised.
What Guests Love
- Walking the restored farmhouse, barns, and fields set to the 1930s of Carter's childhood
- The recorded voice of President Carter himself narrating parts of the site
- The commissary and the tenant houses that show the whole working farm
- The plain, honest sense of how a future president was actually raised
Worth Knowing
- The farm is one of several park sites around Plains, so pick up a map at the visitor center in town
- The farmhouse and grounds are outdoors and rural, so dress for the weather and expect walking
- Plains is very small, so plan your meals and fuel around a compact country town
- It pairs naturally with the Carter sites in Plains itself for a fuller day
Details
Plains, GA
Learn about Jimmy Carter Boyhood Farm
A boyhood on the land
Earl Carter, Jimmy's father, ran the farm and a commissary store, growing cotton, peanuts, corn, and other crops with the labor of the family and of the tenant and hired workers who lived on the place. Young Jimmy did farm chores from an early age, pumping water, tending animals, and working the fields, and the discipline of that life stayed with him.
The restored site includes the farmhouse, the barns and outbuildings, the windmill and well, the commissary, and the tenant houses, giving a full picture of a working Depression-era Georgia farm. It is set to about 1937, and the plainness of the place, no electricity, simple furnishings, is part of the point.
Neighbors and the world of the farm
The farm was not just the Carter family. Most of the people the young Jimmy grew up around were Black families who worked and lived on the land, and he later wrote about how much those neighbors and playmates shaped him, and about the deep injustice of the segregation that governed their lives even as they lived side by side.
The site does not hide that history. The tenant houses and the commissary tell the story of the whole community of the farm, the sharecropping and hired labor that made it run, and the racial world of the rural South in the 1930s that Carter would later confront as a public figure.
From Plains to the presidency
Carter left the farm as a young man for the U.S. Naval Academy and a career as a submarine officer, but when his father died he returned to Plains to run the family peanut business. From that base he entered Georgia politics, rose to governor, and in 1976 was elected president, a peanut farmer from a town of a few hundred people who reached the White House.
Plains remained his home for the rest of his long life. The national historical park ties together the boyhood farm, his old high school, which serves as the visitor center, the train depot that was his campaign headquarters, and other sites, telling a single story rooted entirely in this small patch of southwest Georgia.
The land around Plains
Southwest Georgia is quiet farm country, red-dirt roads and fields of peanuts and cotton stretching to pine woods. It was Muscogee, or Creek, homeland before it was farmland, and the Creek were forced west in the 1800s. The rural landscape Carter knew as a boy has changed remarkably little, which is part of why the farm feels so authentic.
The town of Plains itself is barely more than a single main street, and it wears its connection to Carter openly, with his old peanut warehouse, church, and family sites all close at hand. A visit to the boyhood farm and the town together is a compact, moving portrait of an American life that began and ended in the same small place.
Closest Boutels
The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.
Things to Do Near Plains
Plains
About 2 miles east
The tiny town Carter called home, with the visitor-center high school, his church, and the peanut-warehouse district.
Plains Train Depot
In Plains
The little 1888 depot that served as Carter's 1976 presidential campaign headquarters, now a museum.
Andersonville National Historic Site
About 25 miles east
The Civil War prison camp and National Prisoner of War Museum, a sobering national site.
Providence Canyon State Park
About 35 miles west
Georgia's Little Grand Canyon, a maze of colorful eroded gullies near Lumpkin.