He Left So Much Town Celebrates Its Most Famous – Yet Down-to-Earth – Son

The signs, made by hand or machine, less than a metre square or the size of a truck, were everywhere in this small town on Monday: "Thank you, Jimmy Carter", "Home of Jimmy Carter" and, left over from October: "Happy 100th birthday."

- Timothy Pratt

Smiling portraits of the 39th president of the US were hanging around Plains, Georgia, where he was born and raised – at city hall, in a restaurant.

Residents in the town of fewer than 600 seemed nonplussed by the gaggle of TV news trucks gathered next to the railway tracks that run through town, brought by news of Carter's death on Sunday. They seemed accustomed to the attention that comes with being the home town of the longest-lived and, by many measures, most active former occupant of the White House.

All those who spoke to the Guardian had an anecdote about the man they considered a neighbour, a "regular guy" who just happened to have helped eradicate Guinea worm in Africa, won the Nobel peace prize, and led a disastrous operation to free US hostages in Iran, among many other milestones.

Only a few minutes down US Highway 280 from where Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, lived in town, Haley Beverly, 29, and her daughter, Rosemary, two, were picking up their post shortly after noon. Beverly's husband, Robert, has been the pastor at Plains Methodist church, next door to their house, for eight years.