When Jimmy Carter was four years old, his family moved to a 360-acre farm in rural Archery, Georgia, where they grew cotton, peanuts, and sugarcane. Even at an early age, little Jimmy was expected to pitch in.

From sunup to sundown, he was busy with farm chores. He tidied the yard, gathered eggs from the chicken coop, fed the hogs in their pen, and tended the sweet potato and watermelon vines growing in the fields.

Jimmy’s least favorite farm chore was “mopping the cotton”—a disgusting job that required him to smear cotton plants with a gooey bug-killing paste made from arsenic, molasses, and water. This homemade poison was so potent that it attracted loads of flies and honeybees. The insects would swarm around him since he was covered in the sticky sweet syrup.

Jimmy’s favorite chore was climbing trees to help his mother harvest her pecans, a Georgia delicacy. Before long, Jimmy got a reputation as the best tree climber in Archery. Whenever the town’s farmers went possum hunting, they sent Jimmy scurrying high up into the trees to shake the branches and dislodge their prey. Or that’s what he was supposed to do.

As Jimmy’s father, Earl, tended to his new farm, he began to learn about the Native Americans who once inhabited the western part of Georgia. When Earl discovered that Indians used to live on his property, he became even more curious about the history buried right under his feet. So he ran out and bought some books about Native American artifacts and how to find them. At night, he would read the books to Jimmy, who soon came to share his dad’s fascination.

On rainy days, when work in the fields was impossible, Jimmy and his father would hike the land that Muskogee Indians had called home, gathering arrowheads and bits of shattered pottery. The best time of the year for finding Native American artifacts was early spring, after a long winter of storms, when every turn of a plow would churn up exciting new discoveries.

Over the years, Jimmy and his dad collected hundreds of Indian arrowheads. Jimmy liked competing with his father to see who could find the best and most interesting ones. Finding an especially beautiful “point,” as the arrow tips are called, was a source of great pride for Jimmy. He was always eager to get back home and show his latest find to his family. Unlike other boys he knew, Jimmy never traded his arrowheads. He kept his collection intact.

Eventually, Jimmy left the farm to go to college. But he continued to scan the ground for Indian artifacts wherever he went—in city parks, on golf courses, along the well-traveled footpaths of university campuses. He was surprised to learn how plentiful these treasures were, if you knew how to look for them.

Later, when he became governor of Georgia, Jimmy got his wife, Rosalynn, and sons Jack, Chip, and Jeff to take up his hobby too. If they worked together, the Carters could cover an entire field in just a few hours. They’d line up and walk slowly, back and forth, stopping whenever someone saw a promising piece of flint. Sometimes all they found were broken rocks. Other times they got lucky. On one especially productive day they found twenty-six unbroken arrowheads—a family record.

After Jimmy Carter became president, he and Rosalynn would still return to Georgia for weekend retreats. While there, they spent hours walking hand in hand in the woods and fields searching for arrowheads. By the time he left the White House, Jimmy Carter had a collection of more than a thousand arrowheads. The oldest one was over twelve thousand years old.

Near the end of his term as president, Jimmy Carter signed a law that made it easier to hunt for arrowheads on public lands. As written by Congress, the bill would have banned arrowhead collecting altogether. But the president was determined to protect the hobby for future generations of Americans. He insisted on adding what came to be known as the “Carter Clause,” which since 1979 has guaranteed that kids like him can continue to connect with history by collecting small pieces of it, one tip at a time.