Look inside Jimmy Carter’s peanut farm, where he grew up with no electricity or running water

As a living museum, visitors can press buttons located throughout the historical site to hear recordings of Jimmy Carter’s experience growing up on the farm, and guided tours are also available on weekends.

Many of the farm’s original buildings, from Earl Carter’s commissary to Carter’s childhood home, have been preserved.

Visitors can also tour the Clark home, once occupied by tenants Jack and Rachel Clark who worked on the Carter farm.

The official Jimmy Carter website wrote that Carter spent a lot of time with the Clarks growing up, to the point where the Clarks set up a sleeping pallet filled with either corn shucks or wheat straw that he would sleep on when his parents were out of town. 

The furnishings inside the home were never owned by the Carters, but they were chosen to reflect the time period and are similar to what would have been used when the Carters lived there. 

In addition to a more formal dining room, visitors can tour the family’s kitchen, breakfast room, living room, the bedroom of Jimmy Carter’s parents, Earl and Lillian, and the bedroom his two sisters, Gloria and Ruth, shared at the farmhouse. 

Carter has continued to enjoy the sport throughout his life, especially during his tenure at the White House, but it was here where he first learned the game during matches with his father.

The store wasn’t always open during standard work hours, but Earl Carter would make sure to open it — or ask Jimmy to open it — in order to make a sale.

At age 100, Carter is the oldest living president as well as the nation’s longest-lived president. Following his presidency, he and his wife, Rosalynn, moved back to their two-bedroom home in Plains. Rosalynn died in November 2023 at 96 years old.

After Jimmy Carter entered hospice care in February 2023, residents of Plains, Georgia, have come together to wait for updates and hold vigil for the former president. He has now spent over a year in hospice care.

Jeff Clements, a part-owner of the Buffalo Peanut Company, a commercial peanut sheller and seed treater that owns what was once the Carter family’s warehouse, told the New York Times that “you wouldn’t have the downtown atmosphere that you have” in Plains without Carter. Clements also commended Carter’s humanitarian work.

“The fact he was still willing to be a Christian and act in a Christian way and not be afraid to do so in today’s time,” he said, “that’s more so his legacy than anything he did while he was president.”