PLAINS, Georgia: Jimmy Carter’s long public goodbye began on Saturday in Georgia, with the 39th US president’s flag-draped casket rolling through his tiny hometown and past his boyhood farmhouse on its way to Atlanta, where he climbed the political ladder and based his decades of humanitarian work after leaving the White House.

The former president’s six-day state funeral started in Americus at the Phoebe Sumter Medical Center, where current and former Secret Service agents who protected the late president loaded his remains into a black hearse and walked alongside as it rolled off the campus toward Plains. 

With Carter’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren accompanying their patriarch, a mournful train whistle filled the clear air as the pallbearers faced the hearse, hands on their hearts, for a final goodbye.

In Plains, where Carter was born Oct. 1, 1924, and lived most of his life, mourners lined the main street, some holding bouquets of flowers and wearing pins bearing images of the former president. He died on Dec. 29 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. “He was ahead of his time on what he tried to do and tried to accomplish.”

It was Porter Shelbrock’s idea to make the trip to Plains from Gainesville, Florida, with his grandmother, Susan Cone, 66. He admires Carter for his humanitarian work building houses and waging peace, and talking about a warming planet before the climate crisis was part of routine political discourse.

Willie Browner, 75, described Carter as hailing from a bygone era of American politics. “This man, he thought of more than just himself,” said Browner, who grew up in the town of Parrott, about 15 miles from Plains, before moving to Miami. Browner said it meant “a great deal” to have a president come from a small southern town like his — something he worries isn’t likely to happen again.