Dignitaries and the media had gathered in Baltimore’s Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood to meet him, but on June 16, 1992, Habitat for Humanity’s most celebrated volunteer was focused on the task at hand.

“Jimmy said, ‘We’re going out back, and we’re building you a deck,’” Sonia Street recalled in an interview with The Baltimore Sun last year.

Hammer in hand and insisting on a first-name informality, Jimmy Carter would also frame walls, put in a subfloor and otherwise help transform not just the vacant corner store but also Street’s life.

“I always said, Lord, you knew what I needed in my life,” Street said. “You put these people in my life.”

Today, still living in the home on the 1500 block of North Gilmor Street, she is among those for whom the former president’s death, at age 100 on Sunday, could literally not hit closer to home.

“I’m hurt,” she said, when asked about Carter’s death. “I just busted out crying and thanked the Lord that he wouldn’t be suffering anymore.”

‘Just like one of my family members’

During visits to Maryland over the years, Carter worked on houses from Sandtown in West Baltimore to McElderry Park in East Baltimore to the Clay Street area in Annapolis.

His willingness to get down and dusty, not to mention his serious carpentry chops, set him apart from the kind of politicians who arrive to cut a ribbon, make a few remarks and quickly take off.

“I ain’t never met a president that close,” Ronald Moulden, who lives in a Habitat house in Annapolis, said in an earlier interview with The Sun. “Once they get up on their horse they don’t usually come down to help us low-income people.”

When Moulden, heard the news of Carter’s passing Sunday, he said “it was just like one of my family members had passed.”

Street said she raised three daughters in the Sandtown house and worked double shifts to pay off the mortgage in 15 years. Photos of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter share wall space with her family pictures, and she is proud of her home improvement projects: turning a closet into a laundry room, ripping out that deck to address a rat problem and rebuilding it even bigger.

Up popped peanuts

But she appreciates as much another legacy Carter left her: the gift of giving.

A product of foster care and public housing, Street’s encounter with Carter led her to become a Habitat volunteer and advocate herself, traveling across the country and abroad to help build affordable houses for others.

“He really opened my eyes when I didn’t think I could help no one else but myself,” Street said.

She crossed paths with him on occasion, even visiting him in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, where he told her to pull on a plant in the ground, and up popped peanuts. And she made sure to be there whenever he returned to Baltimore.

Street recalled one event when the Carters’ security detail asked the crowd to move back a bit, saying she assumed they meant everyone else. “You don’t know how close me and Jimmy are,” she told them even as she took a few steps back. “See?” she said after the couple indeed recognized her and stopped to chat.

Street has made sure they know how they helped fulfill for her Habitat’s goal of making home ownership, and the generational wealth it can bring, accessible to people who might otherwise have remained renters.

“Jimmy, I want to thank you and Rosalynn,” she recalled telling them once. “But this is not my house. It’s my children house, my grandchildren house.”

‘Still grabbing that hammer’

Habitat for Humanity of the Chesapeake, the nonprofit’s local affiliate, credits Carter with drawing attention and dollars to its work, which is based on using the “sweat equity” of volunteers and the prospective buyers themselves.

The 100 houses that Habitat planned to renovate or build in Sandtown became 300 as a result of Carter’s 1992 visit, a chief advancement officer for the local affiliate said last year.

Since the announcement on Feb. 18 that Carter would decline further medical intervention in favor of hospice care at his home, those touched by his Habitat work have been remembering his visits to Maryland.

In 2010, the Carters helped build homes in Annapolis and on Baltimore’s East Side.

Moulden, a retired HVAC technician for the state, remembers how impressed he was by Carter’s construction skills.

“Mr. Carter was my buddy,” Moulden, said of the time they spent building the Annapolis house he would buy. “He worked as hard as anyone else.”

Moulden, who still lives in the Pleasant Street house that the former president helped build, said he admired how even as Carter aged, “he was still grabbing that hammer.”

‘An amazing model of a human being’

The earlier Habitat project in Sandtown looms particularly large in the memories of many, recalling a more hopeful and ambitious time when the city invested mightily, if not entirely successfully, in elevating the long beleaguered neighborhood.

Led by the city and the Enterprise Foundation, the visionary developer Jim Rouse’s nonprofit, the more than $130-million effort sought to improve the neighborhood’s housing while also addressing its persistent education, health, employment and public safety deficits.

“That was a wonderful time,” Bart Harvey told The Sun last year.

Harvey, the retired chairman and CEO of what is now known as Enterprise Community Partners, said Rouse and Carter were well-acquainted through their shared interest in affordable housing,

Harvey remained in awe of the energy and relish that Carter brought to the home-building tasks.

“He would run to the site,” he said. “He’s just an amazing model of a human being.”

‘He wanted to work’

Street had been living in Gilmor Homes and working for New Song Community Church and its school as an aide and a janitor, when the head of Sandtown’s Habitat for Humanity asked her to apply for one of the houses.

“I didn’t think I would be qualified or make enough money,” Street said. “My credit was bad.”

Not only was she approved, when Carter came to town, she was asked to speak at the event. Street, who at the time used the name Sonia Moore, said she was a bit nervous at the prospect of speaking. But she said Rosalynn Carter took her by the hand and told her to pretend she was addressing her kindergarteners and preschoolers.

Among those at the gathering was then Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke, who said he thought he would chat with Carter about having served in his administration, “on the junior varsity” of the domestic policy staff.

“He didn’t want to have idle chatter,” Schmoke said. “He wanted to work.”

And indeed, as Carter told The Sun at the time, “What I really like to do is have a difficult, complicated assignment rehabilitating a house or building a porch on a new house and just do it without people bothering me, with two or three ready assistants.

The article went on to note that Carter “worked alongside such bumbling carpenters” as Schmoke — who said he agrees with that characterization — and then U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski.

Death of Freddie Gray

Street can still point out the houses renovated on her block by address, and the row of houses to the rear of her own that the group constructed from the ground up, with “full basements.”

On this tour with her last year, she said she would show visitors other Habitat houses on another nearby street but warned that they likely “don’t want to walk down that way.”

For all the efforts of Habitat and other groups, the neighborhood’s problems, with crime, poverty and joblessness, remain in sharp relief — something that would be highlighted when Sandtown was last in the national spotlight, after the police custody death of Freddie Gray there led to rioting.

But defenders of the effort say they are proud of the lasting improvements they did make, particularly in housing, despite what they were up against — from decades of disinvestment to the legacy of racist policies such as redlining.

“You’re fighting uphill,” Harvey said. “These homes for very low-income people are still there. These people are living better lives because these houses are there.”

Street sometimes thinks that as she ages, she’d like to move to a ranch-style home. Like any homeowner, she’d like to see neighborhood improvements to preserve her property value.

But she remains grounded in Sandtown, where everyone seems to know her, even the children.

“I want to stay as long as I can, be like Jimmy, be in hospice,” she said. “I’m here for the long haul.”

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