Harland Sanders Café and Museum

History

In 1930, Harland Sanders moved to Corbin and started running a Kyso gas station on U.S. Route 25, right across from where his café would later stand. He fed travelers at his own six-seat dining table in the back of the station. By 1937, his cooking had gained a reputation, so he built the Sanders Café, which could seat 142 people. A fire destroyed that building two years later.

Construction began soon after on the current café, plus a motel. The whole complex reopened on July 4, 1940. Inside the café, a model of the motel rooms was set up to convince customers to book a night. Business boomed because U.S. 25 was the main north-south road through central Kentucky.

That changed when the highway split into US 25E and US 25W was moved from running right through his property to a new US 25E roadbed a mile north, meant to connect better with the planned Interstate 75. This shift meant US 25E bypassed the restaurant and town for travelers heading to the Carolinas and Georgia coasts, and when I-75 was finished through the area in the early 1970s, it did the same for traffic going to Atlanta and Florida. Sanders sold the café in 1956 and started selling KFC franchises.

Later, a franchised KFC opened in the building, using the original kitchen but turning the model motel room into bigger restrooms. That KFC stayed open until 1988, when it closed for renovation into the current structure. The café was renovated and reopened as a museum in the fall of 1990. A modern KFC kitchen was built on part of the old motel land and connected to the café by an entrance lobby that holds smaller museum displays.

The model motel room was restored to how it originally looked, and modern restrooms were added at the back of the original building. Visitors can see Sanders’s office, the kitchen where he developed the secret KFC recipe, and various KFC memorabilia.