Jimmy Carter’s long public farewell began Saturday in Georgia, as the 39th U.S. president’s flag-draped coffin rolled through his small hometown and past his childhood farmhouse to Atlanta, where he climbed the political ladder and continued his decades of humanitarian work founded after leaving the White House.The former president’s six-day state funeral began in Americus at the Phoebe Sumter Medical Center, where current and former Secret Service agents who protected the late president attended his Dumping remains into a black grave He drove by in the hearse and walked alongside it as it rolled off campus toward Plains. As Carter’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren accompanied their patriarch, a mournful train whistle filled the crisp air as the pallbearers faced the hearse, hands over their hearts, to say their final goodbyes. In Plains, where Carter was born on October 1, 1924 and spent most of his life, mourners lined Main Street, some holding bouquets of flowers and wearing pins with pictures of the former president. He died on December 29th at the age of 100. “We want to pay our respects,” said 12-year-old Will Porter Shelbrock, who was born more than three decades after Carter left the White House in 1981. “That was him.” He was ahead of his time in what he tried to do and achieve. “It was Porter Shelbrock’s idea to travel from Gainesville, Florida, to Plains with his grandmother, Susan Cone, 66. He admires Carter for his humanitarian work, building homes and building peace, and talking about a warming planet before the climate crisis was part of routine political discourse. Willie Browner, 75, described Carter as coming from a bygone era of American politics. “This man, he thought about more than just himself,” said Browner, who grew up in the town of Parrott, about 15 miles (24 kilometers) from Plains, before moving to Miami. Browner said it meant “a lot.” that a president comes from a small southern town like his — something he fears is unlikely to happen again. Indeed, Saturday’s procession was intended to reflect Carter’s deep rural roots and his remarkable rise to the world stage as a global political leader, champion of democracy and human rights and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Over the course of several blocks in Plains, the motorcade passed the spot where Carter and his late wife Rosalynn, who died in November 2023, ran the family peanut warehouse, the small house where his mother, a nurse, met the future first lady in 1927 brought to the world. The hearse passed the old train depot that served as Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign — a simple effort that relied on public financing and was dwarfed by the billion-dollar presidential campaigns of the 21st century. As it left downtown, the procession passed the house where both Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter died. It’s the same one-story house the couple built before their first Senate run in 1962. Her life there was interrupted only by four years in the Georgia Governor’s Mansion and four years in the White House. The former president was then honored by the National Park Service in front of his family farm, which is now part of the Jimmy Carter National Historical Park. A few dozen rangers stood in formation outside the house, which had no running water or electricity when Carter was a boy, as the old farm bell rang 39 times to honor Carter’s place as the 39th president. Next to the house are remnants of the tennis court that Carter’s father, James Earl Carter Sr., built for the family – a nod to the mix of privilege and hardscrabble country life that characterized the future president’s upbringing. Carter worked his father’s farm during the Great Depression, but the land belonged to the elder Carter and the family was surrounded by black sharecroppers during the era of Jim Crow segregation. Carter wrote and spoke extensively about these formative years and how the abject poverty and institutional racism he saw influenced his future government policies and his human rights work after he left the White House. The motorcade traveled to Atlanta on Saturday afternoon to observe a moment of silence in front of the Georgia Capitol and hold a ceremony at the Carter Presidential Center. Carter will rest there until Tuesday morning, when he will be transported to Washington to lie in state at the U.S. Capitol. His state funeral will be at 10 a.m. Thursday at the Washington National Cathedral, followed by a return to Plains for an invitation-only funeral at Maranatha Baptist Church. He will be buried near his home next to Rosalynn Carter.___Bill Barrow, based in Atlanta, has covered national politics since 2012, including multiple presidential campaigns for the AP.