Thirty-five years after he left the White House, a banner on Plains, Ga’s main street still welcomes tourists to the hometown of Jimmy Carter.

PLAINS, Ga. – Jimmy Carter has helped eradicate diseases. He’s negotiated peace with dictators. He’s aided troubled elections in embattled countries.

If anyone can beat cancer, surely it’s him.

That’s a common refrain right now in the small town of Plains, where residents are reeling from Wednesday’s news that their beloved hometown hero – who is now 90 – has cancer.

“He will fight this, too,” said Ruth Sanders, who runs the Better Hometown Program, a nonprofit devoted to preserving the character of the rural town that’s home to the nation’s 39th president.

“But he’s also a Christian,” she said. “His faith will take him a long way to recoup and to get better.”

A native of Plains, a town of more than 700 people, Carter returned here after losing his bid for reelection to the White House in 1980.

He’s since routinely made headlines for humanitarian efforts, his work with Habitat for Humanity and – sometimes – candid comments on current events.

But, even as his work has taken him all over the world, he has remained just as devoted to his hometown as it has been to him.

Carter’s Sunday School lessons at Maranatha Baptist Church, which he delivers a few times each month, attract hundreds of people. They also draw the local police, state troopers and the Secret Service.

“On the days that he doesn’t teach, we’re a small rural church,” said the Rev. Jeremy Shoulta, the pastor. “On the days that he does, we’re an international church with people from across the country and world.”

Shoulta last saw his presidential congregant after Carter had surgery on his liver last week, when the prognosis was positive.

Now, it’s unclear what the future holds for the only Georgian who has ever served in the nation’s highest office.

Carter issued a statement Wednesday through The Carter Center in Atlanta that said his recent surgery revealed that cancer is now in other parts of his body. He went on to say in a brief statement that a “more complete public statement” would come “when facts are known.”

That could be next week, he said.

“We’re obviously worried,” Shoulta said. “But at the same time, we have hope and will continue to pray for him and support him how we can.”

Carter’s announcement prompted media to descend upon this small town, where clusters of reporters once congregated in the buildup to the 1976 presidential election, in which Carter beat Republican Gerald Ford with a little more than 50 percent of the popular vote.

This week news trucks again lined Main Street in the central commercial district, where the town’s devotion to Carter remains proudly on display nearly four decades after he left the White House.

A sign at the town limits welcomes visitors to the home of the 39th president. A patriotic banner proudly declares Plains the home of Jimmy Carter. And a bed and breakfast has seven rooms decorated according to the seven decades of Carter’s life up until the 1980s. (The ’70s suite is naturally the most popular.)

The former president, meanwhile, has remained just as committed to Plains.

He’s a fixture at the annual peanut festival. He’s active – financially and physically – at all of the Better Hometown Program events. He’s an eager participant in the tourism that drives the town’s economy.

But he’s more than all of that the people of Plains.

To Mayor L.E. “Bose” Godwin III, Carter is a close friend whom he first met many years ago after he first saw Carter shoveling peanuts across the street from his family’s pharmacy.

Through Carter, Godwin said he met world leaders, slept in Lincoln’s bed at the White House and visited Camp David.

He was also on hand when Carter accepted the Nobel Prize in 2002.

“It’s been an interesting life,” he said. “He’s made it interesting.”

Godwin said he believes Carter will fight cancer as “aggressively, like he does everything else.”

It’s a hardship that Carter seemed to recognize was just around the corner when he penned “A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety,” published last month.

He and his wife “are as active as we have ever been,” he wrote. He referred specifically to their expanding family and their work at church and The Carter Center.

“We are blessed with good health and look to the future with eagerness and confidence,” he wrote. ”But we are prepared for inevitable adversity when it comes.”

Jill Nolin covers the Georgia Statehouse for CNHI’s newspapers and websites. Reach her at jnolin@cnhi.com.