TAMPA, Fla. — As news about Former President Jimmy Carter entering home hospice care broke, reactions immediately started to pour in from Carter's family members to city leaders across the U.S.
After a series of short hospital stays, a statement from The Carter Center said, Carter “decided to spend his remaining time at home with his family..."
And even though the 99-year-old, who is the longest-lived American president, is a born and raised Georgia peach and is still calling it home – he took a good handful of trips to Tampa over the years.
Here's a breakdown of documented times Carter was in the Tampa Bay area.
Visit to 'local park' (Oct. 18, 1976)
In this photo from The Associated Press, the then-Democratic presidential candidate arrived at a local Tampa Bay area park and made sure to say hello to a crowd.
Greetings after Lowry Park speech (March 7, 1976)
Another AP photo shows Carter greeting well-wishers after he gave a speech during a rally held in Lowry Park.
Fish fry & rally in Tampa (March 7, 1976)
Carter, still only a presidential candidate, made sure to shake hands and give thanks to the cooks at a fish fry event. It was for a rally.
Town hall meeting (Aug. 30, 1979)
During his first term as POTUS, Carter took a trip to Tampa for a town hall meeting on energy.
During the rally, members of the Revolutionary Communist Party had their banner pulled down by members of the audience and were later arrested for disorderly conduct.
The next day, Aug. 31, 1979, Carter left with style wearing a fire chief's hat to keep his head dry from rain as he said bye to a crowd of people.
Carter was a little-known Georgia governor when he began his bid for the presidency ahead of the 1976 election. He went on to defeat then-President Gerald R. Ford, capitalizing as a Washington outsider in the wake of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal that drove Richard Nixon from office in 1974.
Carter served a single, tumultuous term and was defeated by Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980, a landslide loss that ultimately paved the way for his decades of global advocacy for democracy, public health and human rights via The Carter Center.
The former president and his wife, Rosalynn, 95, opened the center in 1982. His work there garnered a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.