Secret Service agents accompany Former President Jimmy Carter and First Lady Rosalynn Carter to their two-bedroom home in Plains, Ga., after dinner with neighbors. (Matt McClain, The Washington Post)
After he was trounced by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election, Jimmy Carter was 56 and returned home to Plains, Georgia, The town is a speck of cotton and peanut farmland some 150 miles south of Atlanta. It has a population of 700 and a 40 percent poverty rate. It’s also a living museum to Carter, the longest former president in history. In a story by The Washington Post, President Carter says Plains formed him, seeding his beliefs about racial equality, and making him unpretentious and frugal while growing up in a farmhouse during the Great Depression.
