05-28-2025, Florida Key West Trip 3/27 – 6/30 2025, 96 Days, 7986 Miles, 44 Stops

Sunday, June 22, 2025

05-28-2025, Florida Key West Trip 3/27 – 6/30 2025, 96 Days, 7986 Miles, 44 Stops

28 May 2025, Jimmy Carter National Historical Park and Jimmy Carter Boyhood Farm, Plains, Georgia

Plains, Georgia, was only a 30-minute drive from Andersonville and our destination for the day. We visited the Jimmy Carter National Historical Park.

We needed to buy a few groceries and some cold medicine for Barry. We found a Walgreens in Americus on the way to Plains. We stopped and picked up everything on our Walgreens list. We will stop by a grocery store on the way back.

Plains was only another 10 minutes from Americus. Our first stop was the Plains High School Museum and Visitor Center for Passport Book Stamps. Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter attended high school here. What a great job they have done preserving the building and making it into a museum honoring the Carters. The museum has done an excellent job of covering Jimmy and Rosalynn’s time spent here in addition to some of his early political career. There are a lot of great quotes from Jimmy Carter on the walls.

From the high school, we drove across the street to take a photo of the church where Jimmy was baptized. Beautiful looking southern church with stained glass windows. Now off to his boyhood home, which is about 2.5 miles out of town.

The home is right off Old Plains Highway and consists of 360 acres. What a great place for a boy to grow up in. There are numerous buildings to explore, as well as a few goats and horses. The park ranger was dressed in farmer’s attire instead of a park uniform. I think that is a great idea. Vegetables were planted in the vegetable garden area, and corn was planted in another location. The pecan orchard Jimmy’s father planted when he was approximately 8 years old is still there. I learned from the ranger that pecan trees can live up to 100 years.

Back to town, we went, which consists of about seven buildings. Next to where we parked, across from the building, looked like a small park. There were cases that appeared to contain large documents. We immediately gravitated to them. What a wonderful surprise! The cases held life-size bronze copies of the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Civil Rights Amendments. It was awe-inspiring, and my photos below don’t do it justice. What a remarkable thing to put in the middle of your town square. Does your town or city have a display of these historical documents? I wish mine did.

We wandered into one of the antique stores and bought a few things. However, the most important place was the general store, which sold soft peanut butter ice cream! Talk about yummy. I wish we could have brought some home with us. We sat in the air-conditioned jeep and ate every...last...drop.

Our last stop in Plains was the train station, the Georgia Seaboard Coast Line Railroad depot. It served as Jimmy Carter’s campaign headquarters. Most of the display is campaign banners and posters. There was a display that talked about 300+ people from Plains who rode an Amtrak train for 18 hours from here to Washington, D.C., for Carter’s inauguration ceremony. It was arranged by Carter’s campaign aide, Maxine Reese. The train was nicknamed “Peanut Special.”

We made our stop in Americus again for a few groceries and went back to Andersonville for the rest of the day—another great day filled with history.