For a while at least. During the heady opening months of Carter’s presidency, upwards of 15,000 tourists a day turned tiny Plains (population, then and now, about 680) into a tourist mecca. But as Bill Clinton, another Southerner with small-town roots, prepares to take office, the people of Plains have a message for Hope, Ark.: don’t expect a Clinton presidency to turn a small town into a boomtown.
The crowds are long gone from Plains. Only about 35,000 people have dropped by this year, many drawn by Carter’s appearances as a Sunday-school teacher at Maranatha Baptist Church. Of the sundry souvenir shops and cafes that prospered during Carter’s single term, only the Kountry Korner restaurant survives.
Before the hordes of visitors drawn to the block-long uniqueness of Main Street began to dwindle, a remarkable succession of get-rich-quick entrepreneurs descended to cash in on the Carter connection. Their inglorious falls are the stuff of legend around the storefront heaters these days. One classic tale involves a 2,000-acre farm at the edge of town that sold for nearly $2,000 an acre during the boom. Its value now: $400 an acre. The developer hoped to put up something that would appeal to the tourist trade, but the project never moved beyond the talking phase.
Tourism isn’t entirely dead. The old train depot is now a museum featuring a 16-minute video tour of the Carter home and grounds. When Plains High School, which Carter and just about everybody else in town attended, is restored in a 60-40 venture between the town and the National Park Service, it will become the visitor center of the Jimmy Carter National Historic Site. The former president’s cousin, Hugh Carter, who still runs an antique shop full of dusty ‘76 campaign memorabilia, says the upheaval had a positive effect. “People became more proud of their town, and realized what they had here,” he says.
Yet even Plains’s initial burst of prosperity may be hard to duplicate in Hope. Carter made his hometown a fixture of his quixotic run for the presidency long before he won the election. Clinton ran his campaign from Little Rock, and his birthplace, Hope, rarely made the evening news. Bobby Salter, who runs a peanut and candy shop in Plains called Plain Peanuts Inc., believes Hope’s economic prospects are limited: “If the crowds ain’t done hit out there already,” he says, “they can forget it.” But don’t count the tourists out yet. Norm and Jeannine Schmitz, who checked out Plains in mid-December, plan to visit all the presidential historic sites. “They’ll make Hope, Ark., a site,” says Norm, “and we’ll go there, too.”
