Visiting the birthplace of KFC

By Nathan Walls
Editor

When a college student thinks of a fun Spring Break, picturesque beaches probably pop into mind before chicken does. That was not the case for my fiancée Elizabeth Butler and I when we traveled through the beautiful Kentucky mountains to visit my dad and take a short excursion to Corbin, Ky. – the birthplace of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Colonel Harland Sanders opened Sanders Court and Café in 1937, which featured the Sanders Café, where the Colonel perfected his renowned recipe of 11 herbs and spices, and a 32-room motel he ran. An innovative marketer, Sanders had a “Model Motel Room” built within the café to show his hungry customers that food was not the only service he provided and thus increased his profits in another realm. When Interstate 75 was planned to bypass his establishment in the early 1950s, which is located on Ky. Highway 25W, Sanders traveled nationwide selling his recipe to restaurant owners in exchange for a few cents each time it was sold. This led to franchising and the official founding of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Within seven years of hitting the road, Sanders owned 600 franchises at the ripe age of 73. There are now close to 10,000 Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants worldwide. Sanders sold Kentucky Fried Chicken in 1964 for $2 million. Not bad for a former streetcar conductor.

In 1969, Sanders’ motel was demolished, but the café was restored to its original appearance in 1990. A new Kentucky Fried Chicken was adjoined to the old Sanders Café, which houses a museum with the Colonel’s original office, cash register, kitchen, dining room, “Model Motel Room,” and transactional and contractual documents, as well as numerous photos and a model of the old Sanders Court. The Corbin based complex was similar to one that Sanders set up in Asheville, N.C., where Sanders also lived for a short time. The Asheville venue is no longer used for the same purposes.

Everything but the new Kentucky Fried Chicken at Sanders Café is pretty much the same as it was years ago. Sanders, who died in 1980 at the age of 90 from leukemia, would be proud of the feeling that still resides there today. One look at the old stoves, pressure cookers and other cooking tools in the tiny kitchen is a testament to how hard he worked to make his business thrive. Sanders was so beloved by the state of Kentucky that he is the only fast food franchiser to be honored with a bust in the state capitol of Frankfort.

If the free admission to the museum was not enticing enough to hang around and soak in the nostalgia, the helping of chicken we ate there was. The original recipe still is the top-seller of Kentucky Fried Chicken’s products and the place it was perfected at seemed to have the best I’ve tried. That is probably why I would like to travel over 300 miles to get there again, instead of spending Spring Break at the beach an hour or two away.