In February 1975, two months after Jimmy Carter announced he would seek the Democratic presidential nomination, he arrived at the aptly-named Carter Hill Road home of Concord Monitor editor Thomas W. Gerber for an informal gathering.

The hill Carter faced was a big one.

He was a complete unknown, a one-term governor from Georgia with virtually no national name recognition entering a race that would ultimately swell to more than a dozen candidates.

Although only 16 people showed up to Gerber’s home for Carter’s first visit to New Hampshire, the peanut farmer would return to Concord again and again over the coming year, traveling to the capital city at least seven times prior to the 1976 first-in-the-nation primary, according to the Monitor’s archives.

It was New Hampshire that would ultimately catapult Carter, who died on Sunday at the age of 100, to the presidency. And it was Carter who elevated the New Hampshire primary to prominence, betting on its pull when many of the front-runners dismissed it.

Over 12 months, from Feb. 12, 1975 to primary day on Feb. 24, 1976, Carter showed up to Concord’s living rooms and schools, to the State House and to City Hall, peddling a message that centered on decency and honesty. In the wake of utter distrust in government sewed by the Watergate Scandal four years before, it was a sentiment that hit home.

Carter would go on to win the crowded New Hampshire primary by five points, capturing 29% of the vote.

But during that initial three-day visit in February 1975, the Carter fervor that would ultimately take hold must have felt far, far away.

A day after a stop at Gerber’s home, Carter traveled to the State Senate where he told lawmakers that politicians “underestimate the people they are elected to represent.”

A month later and perhaps feeling underestimated himself, he shared the same sentiment at a joint session of the House and Senate, praising the 424-member body as being “the most democratic legislature of all.”

In May, Carter was back again to open his New England campaign headquarters at 20 Pleasant St. As about 50 supporters snacked on sandwiches and drank punch in a two-room office decorated with green and white paper streamers, Carter “repeated campaign promises to bring openness and good management to government,” according to a Monitor reporter who was present.

That day, Carter also made visits to Concord High School and the St. Paul’s School.

At around the time Carter’s New Hampshire campaign was getting off the ground, a young lawyer from Dover became the co-chair of his state campaign. Though Carter was not well-known up north, Bill Shaheen had spent law school at Ole Miss in Mississippi and had come across a newspaper article about the governor of the nearby state.

“I saw this new governor of Georgia who said segregation is over for Georgia forever and hung a picture of Martin Luther King in a very prominent place in the state,” Shaheen recalled in an interview on Monday.

“Someday, I hope he runs for president because any guy who could be in Georgia at that time and say segregation is over is my hero,” Shaheen recalled saying to himself.

When Carter entered the race, Shaheen – true to his pledge – got involved with the campaign, along with his wife, now U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen. The couple remain close to the Carter family.

Over the summer and fall of 1975, as Carter spread his message of trust and accountability across the Granite State, he gained some notoriety for staying in supporters’ homes rather than in hotels because his campaign was so low-budget.

“One of the unique things about Jimmy Carter being on a nuclear sub was when he left the bedroom, it was cleaner than when he went into the bedroom,” said Shaheen, referring to Carter’s Navy service.

As the February primary approached, Carter’s warm personality and famous smile began to win over folks in New Hampshire, according to Shaheen and newspaper reports.

“He was very polite, he’d stay and talk with the people afterwards,” Shaheen said. “He kind of just runs under the radar, and he was meeting people, and people were liking him.”

On Dec. 13, with two months to go until the primary, a columnist observed: “For a candidate regarded by almost nobody as a serious contender just a few months ago, Jimmy Carter is carving a name for himself in his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.”

As the calendar flipped to ‘76, Carter and the other candidates blitzed across the state and pundits declared that the race had narrowed to Carter, Rep. Morris Udall of Arizona, and Sen. Birch Bayh of Indiana.

In a final trip through Concord on Feb. 19, Carter stopped at the United Life and Accident Insurance Company to speak with employees about his energy policy and then toured City Hall, where he dodged “moving and maintenance men as they rolled desks and file cabinets down the stairs.”

On the eve of the election, Concord went dark when a fire at the local energy substation set off a massive power outage across the center of the state.

With just hours to go until primary day, Carter press secretary Brad Woodward worked alone “in the flashlight-lit Pleasant Street headquarters, struggling to answer telephone calls on extension telephones with lights and hold buttons that weren’t working,” the Monitor reported.

But the power outage would prove an after-thought when the result was announced 24 hours later.

Though he narrowly lost Concord to Udall, Carter had easily carried the state.

“I remember when we couldn’t find a microphone,” the new Democratic front-runner told the reporters who surrounded him with their recording devices that night.

Jeremy Margolis can be contacted at jmargolis@cmonitor.com