Dietz Summer Road Trip

Plains, GA is super small so we stayed overnight in Americus, GA for the night. The next morning we drove the 15 minutes or so to Plains, GA. What’s there you might ask?Everything you could ever imagine related to President Jimmy Carter and peanuts. While his presidential library is located in Atlanta, and we weren’t able to get there this trip, we did get to immerse ourselves in the hometown Jimmy Carter experience.

 

We started at the National Historical Site, which is located in the old Plains High School. The museum here touched on how important Plains was in shaping the person Jimmy Carter became, the 1976 campaign, his presidency, as well as the work of the Carter Center today.

 

The part we really enjoyed was how important the school and one teacher in particular was in influencing Jimmy. Did you know: Mrs. Carter was the valedictorian of her class!

 

The National Historical Site is actually comprised of three buildings in town: The Plains High School, The Train Depot (’76 campaign headquarters), and Jimmy’s boyhood home and farm. At the Plains High School there is a Presidential Hometown Passport. There are 15 sites in Plains that are important to the town and Jimmy Carter’s history. At each location there is a plaque and a stamp to help complete the questions in the book. If you visit them all you earn a deluxe Jimmy Carter Presidential Medal. Challenge Accepted!

 

As you might of guessed Plains, GA is very small. Everything is within a mile of each other. So we headed to main street to visit some of the local stores and businesses on the list and ate lunch. They fully embrace visitors and are so very proud of being the hometown of Jimmy Carter and his family.

 

The Train Depot was cool and a lot of information about the campaign to get Jimmy Carter elected in 1976. 

Across the street was Billy Carter’s service station, Jimmy’s colorful brother that at one time had his own beer brand.

 

About a mile out of town you drive right by the Carter’s home. While gated off and not open to the public, you see the white guard shack and Secret Service out front of their farm. There hasn’t been an American president that is quite as connected to his hometown roots like Jimmy Carter. He still teaches Sunday school at his church, they had the schedule posted all over town.

 

At Jimmy’s boyhood farm they had the building open and a butterfly guarden out front.

 

The last stop we needed to make was at the Giant Smiling Peanut that was used on the campaign trail in 1976. You had to go in and talk to the gas station owner to get the answer and stamp.

 

We went back to the Plains High School visitor center and the Park Ranger made sure our answers were correct then presented us with the medal! It was a really cool little scavenger hunt and really got us to go out and spend time (and money) in Plains, GA whereas we would of have probably just passed right through and as the Park Ranger said Plains is so important to President Carter that spending the time there really helps you learn more about him as a person (and peanut farmer!).

 

About 30 minutes from Plains, GA is the Andersonville National Historic Site. While the location itself was once the site of the largest Confederate Prisoner of War (POW) camp, it now also houses the National POW Museum. The museum has artifacts and stories of POW’s from every American conflict and amazing to read the stores of POW’s.

 

Outside you can walk the grounds of where the Andersonville prison once was and the place where over 13,000 POWs died during the Civil War. There is also a National Cemetery there that really makes you think about the mortality of war.

 

We drove a few hours across Georgia and stopped at the last Historical Site. Just outside of Macon, GA is the Ocmulgee National Monument. Here you can see mounds, funeral mounds, and an earthen temple that are thousands of years old.

 

Hopefully on our next journey we can make it to Atlanta and a few other sites we had to cut out of our trip across Georgia. But in one day we were able to visit the hometown of a president, a civil war prison, and an ancient burial mound. When you think about that range of the history and time of what we visited in just one day it’s pretty amazing. America is rich in history and we are so lucky we get to visit and preserve it. Last stop is South Carolina, only one state between us and home!