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. 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.
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