Pink Pig was a Presidential Pick

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter chose the northern Georgia mountains as a place to fish, write books, build furniture and eat barbecue.

Photo Above: The Pink Pig barbecues fresh hams.
Photo Courtesy of Fred Sauceman.

In 1967, Bud Holloway opened The Pink Pig in Cherry Log, Georgia, and started barbecuing fresh hams.

Barbecue has long been associated with politics in the South, and in Gilmer County, Holloway’s place, located about three miles from the Fannin County line, quickly became known as the Democratic barbecue joint. Over in East Ellijay, Oscar Poole ran the Republican competitor, proclaiming that he cut the fat in his barbecue sandwiches and dressing himself in Uncle Sam attire.

When Jimmy Carter was campaigning for governor of Georgia in 1970, he and Bud Holloway became fast friends. Holloway campaigned for Carter all across Gilmer County.

“My parents would even go to Plains, Georgia, to visit the Carters,” says Melinda Hadden, daughter of the late Bud Holloway and his wife Jacque.

And Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter became frequent customers at the Pink Pig, eating there at least once a week when they were in the Georgia mountains. Melinda Hadden recalls that the Carters didn’t come in during off times. They came in during regular business hours, pausing in the middle of their barbecue meals to sign autographs and pose for pictures.

Of the late President and First Lady, Hadden said, “The Carters were approachable. They truly were our friends, not just acquaintances.”

President Carter often called The Pink Pig his favorite barbecue restaurant. He and Rosalynn loved Bud Holloway’s Brunswick stew and barbecue salads, topped with a garlicky dressing that Holloway sold by the jarful, with about two inches of chopped garlic in the bottom.

Holloway’s granddaughter Samantha Callihan, who runs The Pink Pig today with her husband Jacob, told us her grandfather first encountered that dressing at the Lakeside Restaurant in Blue Ridge, Georgia. When Holloway asked owner Casey Creamer for the recipe, Creamer provided it but stipulated that Holloway couldn’t serve it as long as Creamer was alive. When Creamer died in the late 1970s, Holloway put garlic dressing on his menu.

“The Carters would ask my dad to cook them a good country meal,” Hadden remembers. Accustomed to collards back home in Plains, the Carters often requested that Bud Holloway make them a mess of turnip greens. Turnip greens were never on The Pink Pig menu, but that didn’t matter to Holloway, who added baskets of cracklin’ cornbread for the Carters to take back to their cabin at Walnut Mountain. They ate those greens, cornbread and barbecued ham at a dining table President Carter made himself.

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter loved northern Georgia. It was a refuge for them, as they fished for rainbow trout in the waters of Turniptown Creek. A couple of years after leaving the White House, they began planning to build the Walnut Mountain cabin.

With the help of developer John Pope, who was married to President Carter’s cousin Betty, the Carters found a site overlooking a waterfall.

“But the house site had to be blasted out,” Hadden says. “My dad was experienced with dynamite. I remember going to the hardware store in Blue Ridge to buy dynamite, which is hard to believe today.”

The cabin, made from yellow pine, was completed in 1983. To help furnish it, Bud Holloway stepped up again.

“Daddy had a sawmill right behind the restaurant,” Hadden recalls. “He would cut wood for President Carter’s furniture projects.”

In addition to the dining table, Carter made the six chairs that surrounded it and the lazy Susan that topped it.  The cabin’s four-poster bed was another example of the former president’s talent with wood.

In his book “A Full Life:  Reflections at Ninety,” Carter wrote that he used “Colonial-era techniques that required only hand tools and did not include nails, screws, or glue to hold the pieces together.”

One of Hadden’s most prized possessions is a wooden chair that Carter caned for her, with strips of hickory wood. She has thought about that chair a lot since President Carter’s death on December 29, 2024.

In fact, she is working on a permanent tribute to President and Mrs. Carter at her family’s restaurant.

In a publication for the Georgia Conservancy, President Jimmy Carter described his love for the mountains of northern Georgia:

“Here in this natural setting Rosalynn and I have found peace and serenity we seldom enjoyed in our earlier years. Our cabin has been a refuge from the press of civic duties. Here, the rumble of thunder over our mountain hideaway has replaced the 21-gun salute in some foreign port of call, and the water music of a trout stream, the sound of public ovation.”

Fred and Jill Sauceman study and celebrate the foodways of Appalachia and the South from their home base in Johnson City, Tennessee.

The story above first appeared in our May / June 2025 issue.