Military body-bearers carry the casket of former president Jimmy Carter during a ceremony in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday. Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post

The casket bearing America’s longest-living former president, Jimmy Carter, arrived in D.C. on Tuesday after a weekend of memorial events in his native Georgia and was carried in a horse-drawn caisson to the U.S. Capitol, where his body will lie in state in the Rotunda ahead of a grand funeral set for Thursday at Washington National Cathedral.

With a storm just passed and snow blanketing the region, scores of onlookers flanked Pennsylvania Avenue NW, bathed in icy air and waning sunshine, as a military procession escorted the caisson up Capitol Hill from the U.S. Navy Memorial – a mile-long solemn march that recalled a walk of triumph by the 39th president on a similarly cold and bright afternoon nearly half a century ago.

Clara Sachs, a Marylander who is “old enough for Medicare,” stood along Pennsylvania Avenue, clutching a big American flag as the caisson rolled past. She was in college during Carter’s single White House term. “After the debacle of Watergate and Nixon, it was so refreshing and reassuring to have a president with such strong principles and humility,” she recalled through tears, describing Carter as “such a servant of the people.”

Carter, who died Dec. 29 at 100, brought a peanut farmer’s common-folk ethos to Washington in January 1977, often eschewing the kingly trappings of high office. Following his inaugural speech at the Capitol, rather than wave from an armored limo in his parade to the White House, he chose to hoof it down Pennsylvania Avenue, hand-in-hand with wife Rosalynn, becoming the first new president to arrive at the executive mansion by foot.

Tuesday’s procession, headed the opposite way, was meant to evoke the distant memory of Carter’s man-of-the-people stroll as part of a multiday state funeral that he largely choreographed himself years in advance, as other ex-presidents have done.

At Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, an Air Force Boeing 747 dubbed Special Air Mission 39 landed shortly after 2 p.m., delivering the casket from Georgia along with generations of Carter’s closest relatives – his grown children, their children, their children’s children – plus nieces, nephews and friends. The 33 members of the traveling party filed down from the plane in dark coats and sunglasses and waited on the tarmac in a biting wind, listening to the Air Force Band’s rendition of “Abide with Me” and the boom of a 21-gun artillery salute.

Then the loved ones and others boarded a motor coach and shiny black SUVs, and the long convoy accompanying the hearse set off for Washington, about 15 miles away.

A little past 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, the motorcade pulled up to the U.S. Navy Memorial and Carter’s flag-draped casket was ceremoniously transferred from the hearse to the caisson by eight military body-bearers. The Navy Band played “Hail to the Chief” (though Carter as president considered the tune pretentious) and “Just As I am, Without One Plea” as the Joint Chiefs of Staff stood saluting.

In a moment came the faint rumble of drums from farther up the avenue, and the horses, attended by troops of the Army’s Old Guard, clopped forward, six pulling the funeral wagon while another, saddled but riderless, walked ahead, a marching soldier holding the reins.

Christopher Dyson, 59, stood among the throng by the U.S. Navy Memorial. He wasn’t going to let the snow and wind chill stop him from bearing witness to history. “I had to brave the elements,” he said. “I had to pay my respects to my favorite president of my lifetime.”

Dyson met Carter twice, he said, attending Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia, the former president’s hometown. So on Monday, Dyson drove from his home in New York to catch a final glimpse. As Carter’s casket was borne along Pennsylvania Avenue, Dyson ducked inside a nearby cafe in search of a warm beverage.

“It’s cold,” he said, nursing a cup of hot chocolate. “But it’s a great atmosphere.”

The procession arrived at the Capitol’s East Front, and a soldier barked “Ready, step! Ready, step!”, as others in uniform hoisted the casket up the stone steps to the Rotunda, scheduled to be open to the public Tuesday night and from 7 a.m. Wednesday until 7 a.m. Thursday.

The casket was placed atop the catafalque that held Abraham Lincoln’s coffin in 1865, and a host of dignitaries came to pay their respects. Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan, Brett M. Kavanaugh and John G. Roberts Jr. stood with D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser as other luminaries arrived.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-South Dakota, complimented Carter’s work with Habitat for Humanity and his efforts to nearly eradicate Guinea worm disease. “Simply lending his name, or maybe attending a gala or two, wasn’t Jimmy Carter’s style,” Thune said. “He was here to get down in the weeds and the dirt.”

The procession passes the U.S. Capitol. Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, said he was 4 years old when Carter was inaugurated and was the first president he remembered. “It’s obvious now to me, as an adult, why he captured everyone’s attention,” Johnson said.

A farmer who rose to be Georgia governor, Carter arrived in Washington to heal America after the corrosive years of the Watergate scandal. Yet he was beset by intractable troubles of his own: a chronically stagnant economy, the 444-day Iranian hostage ordeal, a global oil shortage that caused endless lines and soaring prices at U.S. gas pumps – the list goes on. And the elites of the capital found him odd. Ever the Southern planter, Carter seemed averse by nature to the schmoozing and ego-stroking it typically takes to get things done in the Oval Office.

But his presidency, widely deemed a failure after his landslide defeat in 1980, has benefited from the passage of decades. While Carter was devoting himself to public service for a half-century, supporting democracy and human rights around the world, many reassessed his White House legacy, vindicating his performance as not so awful after all.

Thune also focused his eulogy on Carter’s postpresidential work, highlighting his dedication to Habitat and retelling portions of a 2018 commencement at the evangelical Liberty University that Carter delivered. “The Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve,” Thune said. “And Jimmy Carter did his very best to live according to the calling of his lord and savior.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, who was the last presidential candidate to receive Carter’s vote, just after he turned 100 last fall, noted that he was the first Oval Office occupant to have a national climate policy, establishing the Energy Department. She lauded Carter for his contributions to environmentalism and conservation and his brokering of a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, and his appointment of dozens of minority federal judges.

He appointed more Black and women federal judges than any previous president, Harris said, and created the Education Department.

“Jimmy Carter was a forward-looking president with a vision for the future,” Harris said.

When she was in middle school, she said, her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, admired Carter’s “strength of character.”

“He served the people, and he left the world better than he found it,” Harris said. “And in the end, Jimmy Carter’s work, and those works, speak for him – louder than any tribute we can offer.”

On the frigid streets outside, there was broad agreement.

Sally Goss, 70, and her husband Tom, 72, drove from Ellicott City, Maryland, to the Capitol, where they joined the growing line waiting to view the former president’s casket.

Francis Shin, a D.C. resident, holds an American flag as he waits in line to view Carter as he lies in state. Pete Kiehart for The Washington Post

Goss said she felt a kinship with Carter because she, too, grew up on a family peanut farm, in North Carolina. “I was very proud that we, the South, could produce a president, and that he was the fine person that he was,” she said.

The couple visited Plains in 2017 and had a chance to meet Carter briefly. As they prepared to wait more than three hours before the public would be allowed in, Goss said it would be worth it. “I think it will be a very moving experience for us,” she said.

“The Carters changed the world,” said Jill Welch, 66, who traveled with her husband from Georgia just to see the funeral events. She and Jack Welch, 67, both retirees, climbed atop a large concrete flower basin near the Navy Memorial for a better view.

“We knew we had to pay our respects,” she said, adding: “President Carter and Rosalynn,” who died in 2023, “gave their whole lives in service to others.

“They were amazing people.”

Karina Elwood, Emma Uber, Kyle Swenson, Dana Munro, Hau Chu, Ben Brasch and Kyle Melnick contributed to this report.