Former President Jimmy Carter, who died Dec. 29 at 100, was born, raised and died in Georgia, but he had a special place in his heart for Alabama.

In a 2009 interview with The Birmingham News, Carter talked about his childhood visits to Birmingham, arriving by train.

Carter, born in 1924, came to Birmingham every summer for at least a week during the 1930s as a pre-teen, he said. On one of those trips, Carter remembered hearing and reading about Will Rogers dying in a plane crash.

‘’My parents would put us on the train, me and my sister, and put a tag on our neck, saying where we going and where we were from,’’ Carter said.

‘’I used to come to Birmingham when I was 10, 11, 12, 13,’’ Carter said. ‘’My father’s oldest sister lived there.’’

His father’s sister was married to Will Fleming, a publisher of Sunday School material for the Southern Baptist Convention.

‘’Before it was moved to Nashville, it was printed in Birmingham,’’ Carter said.

Fleming owned a home in the Hollywood section of Homewood, he recalled.

The Flemings would pick him up at the Birmingham Terminal when the train arrived.

He recalled he was on one of his trips to Birmingham on Aug. 15, 1935, when Will Rogers and aviator Wiley Post died in a plane crash in the Alaska Territory.

But those Depression-era train trips weren’t his last memories of Birmingham. He returned numerous times.

In 1993, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship held a major meeting at the BJCC in Birmingham. Carter, who had recently distanced himself from the Southern Baptist Convention and endorsed the CBF, was the keynote speaker.

Carter returned again for a New Baptist Covenant event he helped organize at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 2009.

In the fall of 2010, Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, cut the ribbon on a Habitat for Humanity home in Wylam, and put some sweat equity into a Habitat house in Fairfield, nailing the address number to the porch and putting on the front door knob.

Carter, dressed in blue jeans and a button-up blue shirt, used a power drill to place house numbers on a column in front of the two-story house on the tree-lined street. Homeowner Ted Harville worked alongside the Carters.

“It’s a nice house,” Carter said. “I told them if they move out, let me know, I might move in here.”