GREENWICH, N.Y. — James Earl Carter Jr. was born October 1, 1924, the oldest child of James Earl Carter Sr., who went by Earl, and Lillian Carter. The first president to be born in a hospital, Jimmy Carter was born in the town of Plains, Georgia. While Plains is considered his hometown, his family home was located a few miles outside of town in the hamlet of Archery, Georgia, where his father operated a 360-acre farm.
Earl Carter had operated a store in the town of Plains in the early 1920s. Through family members and business associates he became more involved in farming and in 1928 decided to become a full-time farmer on property he purchased in Archery (Carter, p. 251-253). Earl Carter’s operation was highly diversified. The farm grew the cash crops of cotton and peanuts, feed crops like corn, wheat, oats, and rye, and other crops that could be used for food or sold for profit like sugar, pecans, watermelons, and various vegetables. Several kinds of livestock were kept for work, food, and profit. Earl rented land to five African American tenant families who lived on parts of the property. Part of being a landlord involved operating a small country store called the commissary which sold equipment, clothing, fuel, medicine, foods and other goods to the tenants.
The Carters lived in a one-floor, three-bedroom home that was assembled from a Sears, Roebuck kit. While spacious enough featuring a screened porch, the house lacked running water and electricity for the first years of young Jimmy Carter’s life. Some of his earliest chores involved toting water from a well to the house and splitting wood for heating. In 1935 a windmill was installed allowing for indoor plumbing for the first time, and later electricity made it to Archery in 1938. Carter humorously referred to this event as the “greatest day of his life” (Bird, p. 16).
Earl Carter was a disciplinarian. Quick with criticisms and rare with encouragements. He was someone that Jimmy revered and worshipped in some ways, but also at times feared (Carter, p. 13). He often referred to Jimmy as “Hot” or “Hot Shot.” If he called Jimmy by his name Jimmy knew he was in trouble or that Earl was displeased with him about something.
Earl was also very entrepreneurial, constantly devising ways to make money from the farm (Bird, p. 16). One example that Jimmy recounted was that one year they had a great crop of tomatoes producing ten acres worth of them. However, every other farmer in the area did too and they could not sell them. So, in some “quick thinking” Earl decided to turn the tomatoes into ketchup to make some money from them. Jimmy inherited some of this drive too when beginning at age five he had a small business selling bags of boiled peanuts in Plains during the summer.
Helping Earl operate the farm was a black man named Jack Clark. Clark served as the farm’s foreman delegating orders, overseeing the livestock and helping in the daily operations of the farm. As a child Earl usually had Jimmy tag along with Jack so he could learn various aspects and processes of the farm. Jimmy would also work with Jack’s wife, Rachel. According to him Rachel could pick cotton and shake peanuts faster than anyone else in Archery. When not working Rachel would sometimes take Jimmy fishing and taught him much about nature (Carter, p. 26-28). Outside of his own parents, Jack and Rachel Clark were influential, parent-like figures in Carter’s life.
Earl Carter and Jack Clark kept an orderly operation with Clark ringing an iron bell to wake the Carters and the tenants up an hour before dawn each morning. The farmers would then work until about sundown where they would go home, wash up, eat dinner, and go to sleep. Jimmy would keep this habit of rising early later in his life. As a participant in this routine he said, “The farm operation always seemed to me a fascinating system, like a huge clock, with each of its many parts depending on all the rest” (Carter, p. 54).
From an early age Carter was involved in these operations. Usually performing tasks before leaving for school and in the afternoon when he returned. As kids he and his siblings, sisters Gloria and Ruth and brother Billy, would earn 25 cents an hour. One of the earliest jobs he remembered performing was delivering water to workers in the fields. Fetching water from nearby springs Carter would carefully lug two two-and-a-half gallon buckets of water trying not to spill any drops along his route. Performing this routine over and over was torturous at times due to the unquenchable thirst of the workers and their jabs at him for being “too slow.” Nevertheless, Jimmy did the task to please his father (Carter, p. 123-124).
Carter was often involved in the weeding and upkeep of the cotton, peanut, and fruit & vegetable fields. One required but dreaded job Carter performed was “mopping cotton.” Boll weevils and boll worms were a regular threat to the region’s cotton crops. To eradicate these pests poison had to be applied to the cotton plants throughout the growing season. Using a stick with a rag on the end Carter and other farm workers would “paint” a mixture of arsenic, molasses, and water onto the plants up to twenty times during the growing season. This was a sticky, buggy, and unpleasant job as Jimmy remembered, “…it didn’t take you long walking down the cotton rows until your pants were covered with syrup…and the flies would come from a hundred yards away, you know, attracted by the molasses. And your legs would be covered with molasses, and by the end of the day, the molasses would get hard, like sugar. You’d take your pants off at night and you’d have to stand your pants in the corner” (Bird, p. 28).
The cotton and peanut harvests were the busiest times of the year on the farm. These harvests involved every able-bodied person in the area, including the children. Carter was often jealous that other kids got to take off school during this season, while his parents insisted he and siblings still attend. However, he would be quickly put to work when he got back (Carter, p. 80-81). In a process called “shaking” peanuts were pulled, dirt shaken off, and then placed on wooden stackpoles to dry. Once dried the peanuts would be separated from their vines with a threshing machine.
Carter described the “shaking” process as difficult because of the “heat dirt, and constant stooping all the way to the ground” (Carter, p. 81). Similarly, the cotton harvest involved much stooping as the process was done by hand and Jimmy had to search through the sharp burrs to find the white cotton bolls. He also remembered that unlike other times of the year the farm did not have an element of community during harvest. Since farmers would be paid based on how much they harvested, it became competitive with each farmer working individually to collect the most and outperform his counterpart. (Carter, p. 283-284).
Other harvests that Carter helped with were watermelons and sugar. The Seaboard Airline Railroad ran right along the farm to the town of Plains. In the watermelon season Jimmy and the workers would load hundreds of watermelons into empty boxcars which appeared during the harvest to be transported elsewhere. Sugar was grown and milled into syrup which was sold at their commissary. The product was named “Plains Maid” syrup and eventually all their products sold in stores went under the “Plains Maid” label (Carter, p. 268-272).
Earl Carter had a belief that everyone and everything had to contribute to the success of the farm. This was evident with the farm’s livestock. The family had a herd of 8-12 Jersey and Guernsey milk cows which Jimmy helped milk with Jack Clark. The milk was turned into sweet milk, buttermilk, cream, and butter, as well as chocolate and vanilla drinks which were sold at local stores (Carter, p. 8). The farm raised hogs which Carter vividly remembered raising and processing each winter. For a short while the family had a herd of sheep which were shorn for their wool to sell to a local manufacturer. Carter said of the sheep, “It seemed to me that the sheep were more trouble than they were worth…They were foolish and helpless, and eventually Daddy sold them” (Carter, p. 312). Carter also had a pet Shetland Pony named Lady as a boy. In order to justify having her Lady was bred several times and her offspring were sold when the time came.
The Carter home’s yard was often filled with fowl of various kinds like chickens, geese, turkeys, guinea fowl, and ducks. The birds were used for meat, eggs, and to sell. Carter recounted how eggs were used as a form of currency in those days so they were often readily available. Geese also played a role in the family business serving as insect control in the cotton fields. Twice a year their downy breast feathers were plucked for bedding purposes. Carter was most scared of these birds as a child as they could be aggressive, and even when he was older remembered the difficulty trying to pluck the feathers while the goose struggled, bit, and defecated all over him (Carter, p. 133).
Despite all the chores that needed to be done Carter was able to have some fun. He greatly enjoyed fishing and hunting, much of the time with his closest friend, Alonzo “A.D.” Davis. A.D. was the nephew of a tenant couple on the farm. The pair and other neighborhood boys had all kinds of adventures in the barns, fields, woods, and swamps around the farm. Of the two hundred people that lived in Archery at the time the Carters were one of only two white families. Even though A.D. and several other playmates of Jimmy’s were black the friends never let the segregated laws and customs of the time get in the way of their friendship. Jimmy later explained that to them segregation was a matter of life they adhered to and did not think about. It was not until they were teenagers and his black friends started to show him a bit more deference that Carter and his friends felt a greater influence of these customs in their lives and interactions (Bird, p. 30; Carter, p. 146).
As Carter got older his father began to include him more in the dealings of the farm. On occasion Earl would take Jimmy with him on rides to inspect fields and meet with tenants. He began to be entrusted with the use of more farm implements. This included the pick-up truck which he started learning to drive at age 12 and by 13 was using to run errands and take girls on dates (Bird, p.28). However, Jimmy’s goal was being allowed to plow. Plowing was a tricky task and if done incorrectly could jeopardize the crop that was being sown. Earl was not keen on the idea at first, so Jimmy turned to Jack Clark who taught him how to properly handle the equipment, work with the mules and horses that pulled the plows, and develop the best cultivating technique (Carter, p.254-256).
Beginning with the home garden Jimmy advanced in the art of plowing. After a few years, Earl finally believed he was able and allowed him to cultivate their fields. Carter wrote of the turning point later in life saying, “The long days in the field were tiring, but in addition to the exaltation of being treated as an adult, the skill required made it challenging, and gratifying when successful” (Carter, p.256)
Carter’s ag skills were also enhanced through his participation in the Future Farmers of America (FFA) while in high school. Through FFA courses Carter and his classmates learned about the care and management of farm animals, crops, forestry, equipment use, food processing and more. He also learned skills in carpentry, blacksmithing, welding, and furniture making. While he performed some of these skills on the farm his knowledge of them grew through FFA. Carter would become an FFA officer at his school and he competed in many competitions like public speaking and animal showing & judging (Carter p. 340-341). As a senior in high school he also worked for the Agricultural Adjustment Administration measuring cropland to determine that its owners were planting within the New Deal program’s acreage allotments (Carter, p. 104).
Carter continued to grow in his skills and in his memoir An Hour Before Daylight wrote, “By the time I was sixteen, I knew about all the chores that had to be performed on the farm, was familiar with the animals and machinery, and was fairly proficient in carpentry and in the skills of a blacksmith. Both in school and from my father, I had learned at least the rudiments of agricultural economics, and was becoming qualified, if necessary, to succeed my father in his chosen career” (Carter, p. 295-296).
However, Carter envisioned a different goal for himself. An uncle of his had made a career for himself in the Navy, and correspondences with him inspired Jimmy to want to join the Navy as well. He made it a goal for himself to attend the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland and serve his country. Through his hard work in school, and some lobbying from his father, Carter was accepted into the Naval Academy in 1943. Yet this was not the end of Carter’s life on the farm. His return to Plains will be discussed in next week’s Hansen’s Histories.
Chandler Hansen grew up and lives in Easton, NY. He is a graduate of Gordon College where he earned a bachelor’s degree in History. He serves as a writer and editor for Morning Ag Clips.
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