Early Life

Sanders was born on 9 September 1890 in a thin-walled, four room shack on a country road three miles east of Henryville, Indiana. He was the oldest of three children born to Wilbur David and Margaret Ann Sanders. Sanders was of Irish descent.

Sanders’ father was a mild and affectionate man who tried to make a living as a farmer, but fell and broke his back and a leg and had to give it up.For two years he worked as a butcher in Henryville. One afternoon in the summer of 1895 he came home with a fever and died later that day. Sanders’ mother took work in a tomato-canning factory, and the young Harland was required to cook for his family.

Sanders dropped out of school when he was 12.[5] When his mother remarried in 1902 his stepfather beat him. So then, with his mother’s approval, he left home to live with his uncle in Albany.

 

Early jobs

Sanders falsified his date of birth and enlisted in the United States Army at the age of fifteen, completing his service commitment as a mule handler in Cuba.[6] He was honorably discharged after four months and made his way to Sheffield, Alabama where an uncle lived.[6] It so happened that his brother Clarence had also made his way there, in order to avoid his stepfather. During his early years, Sanders held many jobs, including: steamboat pilot, insurance salesman, railroad fireman and farmer.

Sanders married Josephine King in 1908 and started a family, but after his boss fired him for insubordination while he was on a trip, Josephine stopped writing him letters. He then learned that Josephine had left him, given away all their furniture and household goods, and taken the children back to her parents’s home. Josephine ’s brother wrote Sanders a letter saying, “She had no business marrying a no-good fellow like you who can’t hold a job.” He had a son, Harland, Jr., who died at an early age, and two daughters, Margaret Sanders and Mildred Sanders Ruggles.