Plains, Georgia, is the kind of place where everyone knows your name because there are so few names to know. Jimmy Carter grew up here, worked the family peanut farm, and returned after his naval career to build it into a successful business. When he announced his candidacy for president in 1974, the national press had one question: who? A peanut farmer from a speck on the Georgia map was running for the highest office in the land. The Carter campaign leaned into the underdog image, and the peanut became its unofficial mascot. Supporters wore peanut pins, peanut hats, and peanut necklaces. The Indiana Democratic Party took things further, commissioning a towering peanut sculpture to tour the state during the campaign. It was absurd, it was charming, and it worked. Carter won Indiana and the presidency.

The statue's construction is as unpretentious as the town it calls home. A framework of wooden hoops gives the peanut its shape, wrapped in chicken wire and coated in aluminum foil and polyurethane. Concrete fills the base to keep the whole thing anchored to the ground. The New York Times described the materials matter-of-factly, as if a 13-foot legume made of household supplies needed no further explanation. The peanut's grin is its most distinctive feature - wide, toothy, unmistakably Carter. It is the second-tallest peanut statue in the world, outdone only by the 'World's Largest Peanut' in Ashburn, Georgia, just a few miles down the road. Georgia, it turns out, takes its peanut monuments seriously.

The statue originally stood near the old train station in Plains. In 2000, a car struck it, and the damaged peanut was repaired and relocated to its current spot along Georgia State Route 45, near the Maranatha Baptist Church where Carter taught Sunday school for decades. Every few years, Michael Dominik repaints the surface in a shade called, simply, 'peanut.' The maintenance ritual has become part of the statue's story - a community keeping its oddest landmark alive through generations. In 2010, Time magazine named it one of the Top 50 American Roadside Attractions, putting it alongside the Cadillac Ranch and the World's Largest Ball of Twine. The peanut had transcended local curiosity to become a piece of Americana.

Plains today exists in a gentle orbit around the Carter legacy. The Jimmy Carter National Historical Park preserves the former president's boyhood farm, his old high school, and the train depot that served as his 1976 campaign headquarters. Visitors drive down Main Street, population 576, past the antique shops and the old Carter warehouse, and inevitably end up standing in front of the grinning peanut taking photographs. The statue became an internet meme in 2018, its toothy smile spreading across social media with the caption 'This Pleases the Nut.' Carter, who spent his post-presidency building houses with Habitat for Humanity and winning a Nobel Peace Prize, might have found this particular legacy the most bewildering of all. But Plains embraces the absurdity. The peanut grins, the tourists come, and the little town in Sumter County keeps its most famous son close.