PLAINS, Ga. — People woke up early here in southwest Georgia on Saturday, braving the morning chill as they began to bid farewell to their beloved Jimmy Carter.

The mood in the former president’s rural hometown wasn’t one of sorrow or grief. Rather, there was a sense of overwhelming gratitude for all that the peanut farmer-turned-commander in chief accomplished during his century on earth.

Plains native Jonathan Gibson and his wife, Kelly, found a spot along the procession route with their three children. They arrived about 8 a.m., nearly three hours before Carter’s hearse rolled through town.

“He meant a lot of things to a lot of people,” said Gibson, who works as an insurance agent. “For me, he was like the last human politician, the last person who had grace and compassion. Politics is so different today.”

The six-day funeral procession will take Carter’s remains from southwest Georgia to Atlanta and Washington, D.C. The procession will return to Plains for a private burial Thursday, when the former president will be interred next to Rosalynn Carter, his wife of 77 years, who died in November 2023.

Carter, who lived longer than any other president, died Sunday after celebrating his 100th birthday in October.

The nearly weeklong funeral procession will pay tribute to the various stages of Carter’s life, from Navy shipman and peanut farmer to state senator, Georgia governor, U.S. president and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, and his efforts to promote human rights and cure tropical diseases through the nonprofit Carter Center.

A motorcade carrying the former president’s remains departed shortly after 10:30 a.m. from Phoebe Sumter Medical Center in Americus, the large regional hospital near Plains. It is where Carter made his final hospital visits before entering home hospice care in February 2023, and where the funeral procession for the former first lady also began.

The former president’s casket was carried from the hospital to a hearse by Secret Service special agents who served Carter for more than 40 years. His remains are being accompanied during the procession by more than 30 family members, including his four children, Jack, Chip, Jeff and Amy, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

The crowd hushed outside the hospital as the motorcade arrived. Most people held American flags distributed by the medical center’s staff. Flags, cameras and cellphones were raised high as the motorcade began its slow roll away from the hospital toward Plains.

Earlier, a steady stream of cars trickled into the pecan grove in front of Phoebe Sumter that served as a parking lot. Mourners stepped out into near-freezing temperatures and pulled on their coats under a clear sky and bright winter sun. People of all ages walked toward the hospital that held Carter’s remains, many in family groups.

Signs of the coming presidential funeral procession were easy to see around Americus: Police cars and Georgia State Patrol cruisers dotted nearly every parking lot and gas station approaching the medical center, and the occasional helicopter buzzed overhead. Near downtown, the sign outside a Dairy Queen read, “Praying for the Carter family.”

Many in the crowd outside Phoebe Sumter had a personal connection to the Carter family. Bobbie Little, a Plains native, said she went to school with Jimmy Carter’s children, nieces and nephews. Her mother, Rachel Clark, worked for Carter’s parents on his family’s farm and helped care for Carter when he was a boy.

Little shared a story about how Carter helped her niece, who had a disability, get assistance when they had nowhere else to turn. Carter’s Habitat for Humanity crew built Little’s niece a wheelchair ramp at her home, Little said, and the Carters were involved with the woman’s care until she died.

Little had a message to share with the Carter family: “He’s resting now,” she said. “He lived a full life. I know you miss him, but you’ve got to hold onto all the memories.”

In Plains, Kelly Gibson, who grew up in nearby Ellaville, said Carter’s niece was her high school English teacher.

”We read a couple of Jimmy’s books. Around here, you start really early,” she laughed. “The community is Jimmy. They act like he did. They try to love everybody and help everybody … I think if you grow up around here you kind of have to love Jimmy.”

Looking at their children, ages 10, 7 and 1, the Gibsons said they’re hopeful for the younger generation, which they described as far more empathetic and compassionate.

The procession stopped at the Jimmy Carter Boyhood Farm, part of the Jimmy Carter National Historical Park in Plains. Carter’s parents settled the farm in 1928, when he was 4 years old, and he would live there until he went to college and joined the Navy. The family grew peanuts, cotton and sugar cane.

Park staff rang the farm bell 39 times, a nod to the 39th president. In his book about growing up on the farm, “An Hour Before Daylight,” Carter recounted how the bell would wake up the family to tend to livestock. In 2003, Carter made a painting of the bell and the painting now hangs at the Carter Center, the nonprofit he co-founded with his wife after leaving the White House.

The crowd in Plains stayed silent as the hearse carrying Carter’s flag-draped casket passed through his beloved hometown, about a three-hour drive south of Atlanta.

The motorcade then headed north. It will slow down as it passes through the Georgia towns of Preston, Ellaville, Butler, Reynolds and Fort Valley, so that mourners can pay their respects on the sides of the road.

It will continue to Atlanta, arriving around 3 p.m. at the Georgia State Capitol, before it proceeds to the Carter Presidential Center, where the former president will lie in repose. Mourners can pay their respects from Saturday night until Tuesday morning.

The six-day funeral procession has been in planning since 1986, five years after Carter left the White House. Organizers of the funeral procession once envisioned his remains being transported by train, an idea scrapped at Carter’s behest.

On Tuesday morning, the funeral motorcade departs from the Carter Presidential Center for Dobbins Air Reserve Base, from where Carter’s remains will be flown to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. A horse drawn caisson will bring the former president to the U.S. Capitol, where members of Congress will pay their respects and Carter will lie in state.

The funeral procession will depart Thursday morning for the Washington National Cathedral, where a national funeral service will be held. President Joe Biden will be among the speakers.

Carter’s remains will then be flown back to Georgia. That afternoon in Plains, a private funeral service will be held at Maranatha Baptist Church, where the former president taught Sunday school for many years. Carter will then be interred next to the former first lady in front of the ranch house they lived in together for six decades.

By 10 a.m., the crowd in downtown Plains swelled into the hundreds as people young and old lined the main thoroughfare of this tiny town to pay tribute to Georgia’s only president.

Flower bouquets and hand-written notes were placed at the base of a marble monument honoring Carter’s legacy. Atop the marker sat two blue Habitat for Humanity hard hats on which mourners scrawled well-wishes and notes thanking Carter for his decades of service.

”Mr. President, thank you for promoting peace,” one person wrote.

It wasn’t just locals who lined up in Plains to pay their respects early Saturday. John Owen and his wife, Maria, said they woke up in the middle of the night to make the three-and-a-half-hour drive from Canton.

”This felt a little more authentic than being at the Carter Center,” said Owen, who left home about 4 a.m.

Maria Owen called Carter a “good man.” Like several others along the procession route, she said that sense of empathy embodied by Carter is largely missing from modern politics. ”He loved people,” she said. “Every choice he made was about loving people.”

John Owen said Carter’s post-presidential legacy transcended his four years in the White House.

”It’s like his life just got better and better as it went on, all the things he did,” Owen said. “He lived a really full life — setting an example for everybody.”

Among those waiting along the road was 12-year-old Will Porter Shelbrock, who convinced his grandparents to bring him to Plains from Gainesville, Florida, so they could see Carter off.

He and his grandmother held up handmade posters. ”Thank you, Jimmy Carter,” he had written in marker, along with a drawing of Georgia’s flag and an outline of the Peach State.

”He lived a life of service,” Porter Shelbrock said. “He was building homes and doing humanitarian stuff in his 90s. He’s done so much for Georgia, the country and the entire world.”

His grandmother, Susan Cone, beamed as she looked on. Not many 12-year-olds would insist on traveling to another state so they could pay their respects to a former president, she said.

Farther north, along the dozen miles or so from Fort Valley in the heart of Georgia peach country to Byron along I-75, police cars and fire trucks were stationed at almost every intersection.

Near downtown Fort Valley, in the parking lot of a Family Dollar store, nearly 50 locals gathered to bid Carter farewell.

Ginette Trapp, 58, a school teacher, recalled visiting the White House as a sixth-grader at a school in Columbus while Carter was in office. She said he waved at her and her classmates. On Saturday, here she was to wave goodbye.

“I remember my parents and all the other adults talk about what a good person was and how historic it was that we had a president from Georgia,” Trapp said. “That resonated with me my entire life.”

Another woman on hand to watch the procession, Maryann Willis, referred to Carter as “a humble, Biblical person that came from nothing.” Willis, 64, who lives in nearby Roberta, said, “God saw fit to let him have something, but he didn’t let it take control of him.”

Seeing the motorcade cruise through, she said, would let her “know that’s a child of God going home.”

A little after 12:30 p.m., the procession passed through Fort Valley and continued its journey to Atlanta.

By then, a small crowd had already gathered at the Georgia Capitol. More than 90 Georgia lawmakers, three former governors, three state Supreme Court justices and a few statewide constitutional officers will join Gov. Brian Kemp and legislative leaders to pay their final respects. So will about half a dozen members of the Georgia State Patrol detail assigned to Carter when he was governor from 1971 until 1975.

Among those standing in the crowd outside Phoebe Sumter, where the procession began, was Walter Knighton, the superintendent of Sumter County Schools.

He reflected on the scene in Americus: hundreds of mourners gathered to celebrate the life of a centenarian former president, his legacy visible in the backdrop of a Georgia pecan grove framing a modern medical facility.

”He was a true statesman,” said Knighton, noting Carter also was instrumental in a program that has sent dozens of local high school students on trips abroad.

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(Reporter Greg Bluestein contributed to this report.)

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