WASHINGTON – Former President Jimmy Carter’s youngest child and only daughter were among the people gathered in Washington on Tuesday to honor their father on the highest national stage.

Amy Carter, 57, sat with her older brothers Jack, Chip and Jeff and other members of the Carter family in the Capitol Rotunda as members of Congress and other leaders paid their respects to the late 39th president.

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Carter’s coffin was carried by horse-drawn caisson to the ornate hall on Capitol Hill. The funeral procession through the streets of Washington was intended to be a mirror image of his inaugural parade in 1977, when Carter and his wife Rosalynn walked from the Capitol to the White House. Amy Carter, then 9, accompanied her parents on part of the trip.

During her father’s presidency, Amy Carter quickly became the subject of public fascination. From dinners with movie stars to roller skating with friends on the South Lawn, her life as a child in the White House – the first since John F. Kennedy’s Camelot more than a decade ago – is well documented.

Before the age of ten, she was also a political symbol. Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter rejected the capital’s elite private schools and enrolled Amy, whose older brothers were already adults, in a public elementary school. Carter was only the second president, after Theodore Roosevelt, to enroll his child in public school.

Later, as a teenager and young adult, Amy Carter made a splash in her own right, with several arrests related to protests against South African apartheid and U.S. involvement in Nicaragua.

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But since she was a teenager, the youngest child in the first family has largely withdrawn from the public eye, instead leading a quiet life in her home state of Georgia. She was once a part-time art teacher at a private school in Atlanta, The New York Times reported.

Amy Carter always preferred her privacy, those who knew her told the Times. Her return to Washington this week is one of the few moments in the spotlight in recent years.

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Following the death of Rosalynn Carter in November 2023, Amy Carter spoke at a memorial service in Atlanta and read an emotional love letter from her father to her mother, dated 75 years earlier.

“My darling, every time I was away from you, I was thrilled to come back and discover how wonderful you are,” she read from her father’s words. “…Goodbye, darling. See you tomorrow, Jimmy.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Amy Carter returns to her father’s funeral after retiring from public life