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

Carter lived at the farm from the age of 4 until he departed for college in 1941. Carter’s family didn’t have running water until he turned 11, and they didn’t get electricity until three years later.

“The greatest day in my life was not being inaugurated president, [and] it wasn’t even marrying Rosalynn — it was when they turned the electricity on,” Carter said, according to the New York Times.

Carter received a bachelor’s from the United States Naval Academy in 1946 and served as a submariner in the United States Navy before entering politics. When he became president in 1977, he put the farm into a blind trust, allowing a third party to take control of it while he was in the White House, avoiding any conflicts of interest, according to the National Park Service.

When he left the White House in 1981, the law firm managing the trust revealed the farm was $1 million in debt due to drought and changes in management, and the Carters sold it, the National Park Service said. 

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.

The farm is located in Archery, Georgia, about 3 miles from the nearby town of Plains.

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. 

In 1994, the National Park Service purchased Carter’s three-bedroom childhood home and 17 acres of the once 360-acre farm to create the historical site. 

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 also had a younger brother, Billy, who slept in their parents’ room until Jimmy left the farm for college in 1941.

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 commissary was run by Earl Carter in order to make extra money, provide his tenants and the residents of Archery a place to buy needed supplies, and sell gas to passing motorists, the National Park Service reported.

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.

The property is still an active farm, and crops are still grown periodically throughout the year. Some of the crops still grown on the farm include sugarcane, cotton, corn, tomatoes, and peanuts.

Honeybees, goats, chickens, mules, and farm cats also call the Boyhood Farm home.

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.”