In the interview below, President Jimmy Carter describes what it was like growing up on the Southwest Georgia farm during the difficult years of the Depression. James Earl Carter, who was to become the 39th President of the United States, was born in Plains, Georgia, October 1, 1924, to Earl and Lillian Carter. He was the oldest son in a family that would eventually include two sisters - Gloria, born in 1926, and Ruth, born in 1929 - and a brother, Billy, born in 1937. In 1928, Earl Carter moved his family to Archery, two and one-half miles west of Plains on the old Preston-Americus Road. In 1941 Jimmy Carter would leave Archery and Plains for a career as a naval officer, farmer, state legislator, governor and, eventually, United States President. But for the first seventeen years of his life, the Carter farm, the settlement of Archery and the farming community of Plains composed the boundaries of his physical world. This interview with President Carter was conducted for The Best of Georgia Farms Cookbook and Tour Book published in 1998. 

"Well the farm itself, the whole thing, was about 360 acres. We grew cotton then shifted strongly to peanuts. We grew wheat, oats, rye as well as other things. In addition to cattle and sheep, we produced some of our own mules. Daddy always had about six mares, and he kept a very highly qualified and high-quality jackass to breed with the mares. We had about fifty geese that ran wild. We would harvest them twice a year; pick the breast feathers off. Daddy would often have down comforters made, which he sold for a pretty good price in our store, and he would peddle them around in other stores. We grew sugar cane and made syrup out of it, which Daddy sold under his brand name, which was ‘Plains.'

"We had it ingrained in us that hard work was an important part of life. Not a blemish on life but an asset to life. It was almost ingrained in us like our own religion was. It was the priority of and the honor of doing hard and successful work on the farm. Our bell rang every morning at four o'clock - before daybreak. We would get up, dress, go to the barn, catch the mules, put our plowstocks on the back of the wagon and drive the mules and wagons to the fields. And we would be standing at the end of the rows when daybreak came so that we could see where the cotton and peanuts were so we wouldn't plow them up. We would begin plowing, and we did that until sundown. Came back home and watered the livestock, ate supper and went to bed. So that was our day's work.

"You would break the land first with mules and a turning plow and that would leave the earth broken down, I'd say an average of five inches. A tractor, now, can break it down to about eight inches. But after you broke the land down, you had a very uneven surface. So you would drag the harrow over it to smooth the top of the surface down to make it more effective when you laid off your rows and put out fertilizer and then planted your cotton, peanuts or corn on a smoother surface. We had a spring-tooth harrow that would go through the ground. And spikes were on a kind of spring. They were curved over and were about a foot off the ground, and they would kind of chop up the ground. The other one was a drag harrow and it had a spike like a railroad spike, and it would stick in the ground and just kind of smooth out the top of the ground.

"The best job I had on the farm was pruning watermelons. A friend and I would go through Daddy's fields and my friend's father's fields with a pocketknife. We would select the deformed or small watermelons and cut them off the vine so they wouldn't sap the nutrients from the vine. We would leave the good watermelons on the vine. We would probably do that two or three times during the growing season. That was the most pleasant small chore I had.

"The worse by far was mopping cotton. Boll weevils were becoming more and more of a problem then as they spread throughout the South, and the worse place they could be was in the bud of a growing cotton plant. When cotton plants were maybe a foot high, less than about knee high, we would have to go through the fields and mop the cotton. We mixed arsenic and molasses and water and we carried a small bucket in our hands. Daddy would haul a barrel of this mixture to the end of the rows. Long rows. And we would go down the row and, with a stick with a little rag mop on the end, dip the rag mop in the bucket of this poison and put a dab of it in the bud of each growing cotton stalk. As we walked through the fields, we would be almost covered with flies - as they were attracted to the molasses. When we would get home at night and take off our pants - we wore long pants in the field and went barefooted - you could just stand them up in the corner. Once you messed up a pair of pants, you had to go with it. By the next morning they were sticky but stiff, and they would even crackle sometimes when we started walking early in the morning. Then, of course, with the warmer weather and the fresh application of spattered molasses, water and arsenic on them, they would loosen up some. I started doing this when I was about eight years old. When I wasn't at school, I would be mopping cotton.

"We didn't have anything on the farm that was mechanized except a small gasoline motor that drove a pump near the barn to pump water. We would crank that little motor up - it had a fly wheel on it-and it would pump water. When you couldn't crank it, you had to pump it by hand.

"We had a windmill to provide water for the house. That was installed several years after we moved out to the farm. At first we didn't have any running water in the house; but the windmill provided water and then, of course, when I was fourteen years old, in 1938, we got electricity. We had an outdoor toilet. "All of the cultivation, all of the breaking of land, all of the harvesting was done with hand labor and mules. We didn't get our first truck until the year I went off to college, which was in the winter of 1941.

"It was very difficult at that time to make a living. During the Depression years, there was no money to amount to anything. We were mutually interdependent, not only with each other in the family, but also with our neighbors.

"The seasons came and went. We took pride always in the care of our land and with the principle that we were caretakers for God and protecting the world that he had given us. At least once a year, we would have a Sunday in all three major churches in Plains for honoring the natural beauty of our countryside and our farm. So the stewardship of nature, of preserving the quality of our land, the beauty of our woodlands, protection of wildlife was immediately and dramatically tied in with our belief in God."

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