President Jimmy Carter's funeral procession took him one last time to the place of his childhood, as the car paused outside the farm where he was raised.
In what was a moving and personal tribute, as the car paused the National Park Service saluted the late president and rang the historic farm bell 39 times, in reference to his role as the 39th President of the United States.
© POOL/AFP via Getty ImagesSecret Service members carried the late President's body into a hearse after leaving the Phoebe Sumter Medical Center in Americus, Georgia, where Jimmy's beloved family had arrived earlier in the day.
The hearse then made its way, escorted by a motorcade, to the politician's hometown of Plains, Georgia.
© POOL/AFP via Getty ImagesA private service will be held at the Carter Center in Atlanta on Saturday afternoon, and the public can pay their respects through Tuesday.
The procession will then head north to Washington DC for a national funeral service at Washington National Cathedral.
© POOL/AFP via Getty ImagesThe farm was sold by his father in 1949, but the National Parks Service later purchased the home and the surrounding seventeen acres in 1994, restoring it to its 1937 appearance and opening it to the public as the Jimmy Carter Boyhood Farm in 2000.
Carter was raised on the farm between 1928 – when he was four-years-old – and 1941, when he left to attend college.
© Getty Images"The front door was locked when we got there, and daddy realized that he had forgotten the key," Carter wrote in his 2001 memoir, An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood.
"He tried to raise one of the windows that opened onto the front porch, but a wooden bar on the inside let it come up only about six inches. So he slid me through the crack and I came around to unlock the door from the inside. The approval of my father for my first useful act has always been one of my most vivid memories."
© Getty ImagesCarter died on December 29, at the age of 100, as the longest-lived Commander-in-Chief in American history.
"My father was a hero, not only to me but to everyone who believes in peace, human rights and unselfish love. My brothers, sister and I shared him with the rest of the world through these common beliefs," a statement by his son James E. Carter III read.
"The world is our family because of the way he brought people together, and we thank you for honoring his memory by continuing to live these shared beliefs."
© Sports Illustrated via Getty ImaThe former president's wife Rosalynn Carter, whom he married in 1946, died on November 19, 2023, months after the Carter Center revealed her dementia diagnosis.
Before, during, and after his presidency, Carter was an advocate for civil rights; during his tenure as governor of Georgia, he angered the Ku Klux Klan when he hired Black employees and added the portraits of three prominent Black Georgians to the capitol building.
As President, he appointed more women and minorities to federal judgeships than all 38 Presidents before him, combined. Citing cost concerns for taxpayers, he also sold the presidential yacht, the USS Sequoia.
