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KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Habitat for Humanity Greater Salt Lake, along with every Habitat chapter, honored Jimmy Carter with a ceremonial wall.
• Attendees praised Carter's compassion, integrity, and decades-long involvement with Habitat.
• The public can sign the wall sections, which will be used in future homes.

SALT LAKE CITY — When former President Jimmy Carter entered hospice nearly 23 months ago, Habitat for Humanity International contacted every chapter — the Greater Salt Lake area chapter included — and asked them to build ceremonial walls to honor their most famous volunteer upon his death.

Month after month, time went on with the happy news of Carter's continual living, but on Dec. 29, 2024, Carin Crowe, the executive director of Habitat for Humanity Greater Salt Lake, heard the news of the former president's passing. With sadness, she got her crew together to build the wall.

Thursday morning, in the entryway of Utah's Habitat for Humanity ReStore, Crowe led a small ceremony that included a blessing of the door and the connecting walls, sections of which will be placed in the next Habitat homes. She also noted that the public will be welcome to come and sign sections of the wall with well wishes and blessings for new homeowners.

"He was such an integral and profound part of Habitat for Humanity," Crowe told the small crowd. "And we are about to raise this lumber where people are going to place their blessings ... so those blessings will go into the walls of our next builds."

During the ceremony, Crowe gave a short history of Carter's beginnings with Habitat for Humanity, which took place not in Plains, Georgia — his hometown — nor Atlanta, nor Washington, D.C., but in New York City when he and his wife Rosalynn built a six-story home in 1984.

The relationship with Habitat continued into his 90s, with Carter assisting with the building of a home in Nashville at 95 years old.

Although the relationship with Habitat was the key reason people participated in and attended the ceremony, the secondary reason was just as powerful: Carter was just a good man who will be missed, many attendees said.

"I think the big deal, at least for me, and I think I speak for a lot of people, is he was such a man of compassion and faith and dignity and honesty," said the Rev. Brian Diggs, executive director of Homeaid, a housing program in the Salt Lake area, who also performed the blessings for the wall.

"People, over the decades, have come not only to appreciate but also to really honor him as a man of extreme integrity," Diggs said.

Jeffrey Copeland, the man who literally built the walls and doors that will honor Carter, has worked with Habitat for Humanity, teaching construction skills to future homeowners and volunteers. He has recently been learning more and more about Carter and has been impressed.

As the construction manager, Copeland said he has been a part of the building of many Habitat homes, but he never had to build a wall quite like this.

"I'm gonna be paying special attention on where I'm going to put (the walls)," Copeland said. "I didn't know Jimmy Carter personally, but from everything I've read and heard, he seems like a really amazing man. So, this will be a lot more than a blessing but a reminder of everything he did and was a part of."

Crowe did not know Carter personally, either, but she did have a personal connection with the then-president when she was 8 years old.

She wrote to the president about an animal rights issue and had a petition with thousands of names on it to show she was not alone in her support. Carter sent a letter back to the then-third grader. He told her that "it will be children like you that will be the change we need to see in this world," Crowe said as she remembered the letter with her emotions apparent.

To Crowe and others at the ceremony, Carter was not simply a former peanut farmer or a man who lost the 1980 presidential election. As they alluded to over and over, he was a man who impacted their lives in profound ways, more so for his work after the White House than his efforts during.

"The letter quite literally changed my life," Crowe said. "I don't know what I'm going to write on the wall yet ... but it feels like it will be very personal."

If you want to sign the Jimmy Carter wall, visit Habitat for Humanity Greater Salt Lake ReStore, 276 S. 500 West in Salt Lake City. Call 801-263-0136 before you go to check if it is open.

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The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.

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Ivy Farguheson

Ivy Farguheson is a reporter for KSL.com. She has worked in journalism in Indiana, Wisconsin and Maryland.