Jimmy Carter House
Jimmy Carter House, Memorial Garden and Gravesite | |
Front facade of 209 Woodland Drive, 1979 | |
| Location | 209 Woodland Drive (house) 1 Woodland Drive (gravesite & memorial garden) Plains, Georgia |
|---|---|
| Coordinates | 32°02′08″N 84°24′06″W / 32.03556°N 84.40167°W |
| Built | 1960 |
| Part of | Jimmy Carter National Historical Park (ID01000272) |
The Jimmy Carter House, Memorial Garden & Gravesite is the longtime home and final resting place of Jimmy Carter (1924–2024), the 39th president of the United States, and his wife Rosalynn Carter (1927–2023), located at 209 Woodland Drive in Plains, Georgia, United States, within the Jimmy Carter National Historical Park. It is the only house that the Carters ever owned, and the family occupied it from 1961 until Jimmy Carter's death in 2024.
The house was built by the Carters in 1960 and 1961, and additional work on the home occurred in 1974 and 1981, with the addition of a porch, garage, and guest apartment. The Carters knocked down a wall themselves during remodeling of the house in the 2010s. Rosalynn Carter described the work of knocking down the wall as "second-nature" due to the couple's extensive work with the charity Habitat for Humanity.
The one-story house is set on a lot of 2.4 acres (0.97 ha); it was built at a price of $10 per square foot (equivalent to $109 in 2025). The house was built to accommodate the Carters' growing family; they had three young sons, James, Donnel, and Jack, at the time of its construction, and when new had four bedrooms. The property was, until the death of Jimmy Carter, protected by the U.S. Secret Service with public access to Woodlawn Drive and the property prohibited. The United States government purchased the adjacent property at 1 Woodland Drive (referred as "Gnann House") in 1981 following the Carters' return from Washington D.C. for use by the Carter's Secret Service protection detail.
A pond on the grounds, now part of the memorial garden, was personally dug by Jimmy Carter; he used it for fly fishing. A magnolia tree on the grounds was grown from a tree on the lawn of the White House that was planted by President Andrew Jackson.
The Historic American Buildings Survey describes the house as a "modest 1960s ranch-style house". In a 2018 profile of the Carters' life in Plains for The Washington Post, Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan described the house as "dated, but homey and comfortable".