Jimmy Carter’s coffin travels to Atlanta as 39th US president’s funeral begins

With Mr Carter’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren accompanying their patriarch, a mournful train whistle filled the clear air as the pallbearers faced the hearse, hands on their hearts, for a final goodbye.

In Plains, where Mr Carter was born on October 1, 1924, and lived most of his life, mourners lined the main street, some holding bouquets of flowers and wearing pins bearing images of the former president.

He died on December 29 at the age of 100.

“We want to pay our respects,” said 12-year-old Will Porter Shelbrock, who was born more than three decades after Mr Carter left the White House in 1981.

“He was ahead of his time on what he tried to do and tried to accomplish.”

It was his idea to make the trip to Plains from Gainesville, Florida, with his grandmother, Susan Cone, 66.

He admires Carter for his humanitarian work building houses and waging peace, and talking about a warming planet before the climate crisis was part of routine political discourse.

Willie Browner, 75, described Mr Carter as hailing from a bygone era of American politics.

“This man, he thought of more than just himself,” said Mr Browner, who grew up in the town of Parrott, about 15 miles from Plains, before moving to Miami.

Mr Browner said it meant “a great deal” to have a president come from a small southern town like his, something he says is not likely to happen again.

Indeed, the procession on Saturday was intended to reflect Mr Carter’s deep rural roots and remarkable rise to the world stage as a political leader, global advocate for democracy and human rights, and a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

In Plains, the motorcade passed near where Mr Carter and his late wife Rosalynn, who died in November 2023, ran the family peanut warehouse, and the small home where his mother, a nurse, had delivered the future first lady in 1927.

The hearse passed the old train depot that served as Mr Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign headquarters, a barebones effort that depended on public financing, dwarfed by the billion-dollar US presidential campaigns of the 21st century.

The procession passed the home where Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter both died.

It is the same house the couple built before his first Senate campaign in 1962, their lives there interrupted only by four years in the Georgia governor’s mansion and four years in the White House.

Then the former president was honoured by the National Park Service in front of his family farm, now part of the Jimmy Carter National Historical Park.

A few dozen rangers stood in formation in front of the home, which did not have running water or electricity when Mr Carter was a boy, as the old farm bell rang 39 times to honour Mr Carter’s place as the 39th president.

Beside the house is the tennis court that Mr Carter’s father, James Earl Carter, built for the family, a nod to the blend of privilege and hard rural life that defined the future president’s upbringing.

Mr Carter worked on his father’s farm throughout the Great Depression but it was land that the elder Carter owned, and the family was surrounded by black tenant farmers in the era of Jim Crow segregation.

Mr Carter wrote and spoke extensively on those formative years and how the abject poverty and institutional racism he saw influenced his future policies in government and his human rights work once he left the White House.

The motorcade was travelling to Atlanta on Saturday for a moment of silence in front of the Georgia Capitol and a ceremony at the Carter Presidential Centre.

There, Mr Carter will lie in repose until Tuesday, when he will be transported to Washington to lie in state at the US Capitol.

His state funeral is on Thursday at the Washington National Cathedral, followed by a return to Plains for an invitation-only funeral at Maranatha Baptist Church.

He will be buried near his home, next to Rosalynn Carter.