Former president Jimmy Carter will reach an unprecedented milestone Tuesday — the first living president to reach age 100.
The event will be an even bigger deal in Carter’s 600-resident hometown of Plains, Georgia, where he has lived since leaving the White House in early 1981.
“The Carters have a lot of milestones,” said Jill Stuckey, a Plains resident and superintendent of the Jimmy Carter National Historical Park. “They were the longest-married presidential couple at 77 1/2 years, and now he is the longest-living U.S. president.”
Carter is also the last surviving member of his graduating class at Plains High School, from which he graduated in 11th grade in 1941 as there was no 12th-grade curriculum at the time. He was married to Rosalynn Carter from 1946 until her death last year at age 96.
The park Stuckey oversees includes Carter’s boyhood farm, the now-closed high school, the railroad depot that served as his 1976 campaign headquarters, and the home where he still resides.
“Everybody is really excited,” Stuckey said. “President Carter has been in hospice now for a year and seven months. In February, it will be two years that he has been in hospice. Most of us thought that when he went to hospice it would be a matter of days or maybe weeks. But the one thing that Jimmy Carter has failed at in his life is hospice, and we’re pretty happy about that.”
Carter’s hometown will go all-out for the occasion.
Festivities will begin Saturday with a road race in the morning, followed by the Plains Peanut Festival parade at 11 a.m., then a street dance in the evening. Plains is part of the Georgia peanut belt, and Carter was a peanut farmer before entering politics.
Wayne Johnson will be one of the parade participants. A longtime friend of Carter, he is running for Congress in Georgia’s geographically massive 2nd Congressional District.
“I first met him between 20 and 25 years ago,” Johnson said. “Knowing President Carter has been an important part of my development from the standpoint of making me want to be in public service.”
Johnson is running against longtime incumbent Sanford Bishop (D-GA) with a message of “stop the stupid in Washington.” Though he is a Republican, he says he has always gotten along well with Carter, in part because they usually do not talk politics. The Washington Examiner has contacted Bishop’s office seeking comment.
Carter’s actual birthday is not until Tuesday, which will come with its own slate of events. The first will be the naturalization of 100 new U.S. citizens, a military flyover with four F-18 Navy jets, and then a host of World War II-era planes that will fly over downtown Plains.
At 4:30 p.m., the city will host a ribbon-cutting ceremony for new statues dedicated to the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, and legislation signed during the Civil Rights era. The final event will be a concert at the old high school.
Another concert was filmed at Atlanta’s Fox Theatre on Sept. 17. Featuring Georgia-based acts such as the Drive-By Truckers, India Arie, the B-52’s, and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, it will air on local public television that night.
Carter has led one of the most active postpresidency lives since returning home following his 1980 defeat to Ronald Reagan. He was 56 at the time, and he spent the next decades building charities such as Habitat for Humanity and the Carter Center, the latter of which helped him win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
For decades, Carter also taught an adult Sunday school class at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains. Nelle Ariail, wife of the late Maranatha pastor Dan Ariail, has known Carter since 1982 and watched his class grow from the church’s fellowship hall into the sanctuary.
“I remember one Sunday, Dan just about had to step over people at the pulpit to preach,” she said.
Visitors came from all over the world to see him, sometimes from as many as 15 different countries in a single week.
Ariail got to travel with Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter on Habitat for Humanity “work weeks” to places such as New York and Chicago, and to farther places such as Tijuana, Mexico. On the Mexico trip, they all slept in tents, and she could hear the Carters reading one chapter of the Bible every night in Spanish to practice the language.
“The last night, when we presented the keys to the people who were getting the houses, we had a big closing-out ceremony, President Carter delivered his speech in Spanish,” she said. “That was quite a feat.”
Carter has been much less active in recent years. He entered hospice in early 2023 and his wife, Rosalynn, died in November of that year.
While Carter is no longer awake every day, according to his grandson Jason Carter, his family members still cherish their time with him.
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Not only that, Jimmy Carter is hoping to hang on long enough to cast a vote for Vice President Kamala Harris in this fall’s election.
Early voting in Georgia, a state President Joe Biden won over former President Donald Trump by about 12,000 votes in 2020, starts on Oct. 15.
