Rare Colonel Sanders Collection Goes Up for Auction at Kentucky Restaurant

If you're ever in eastern Kentucky and traveling on Interstate 75, do yourself a favor: Take the Corbin exit and head to the Harland Sanders Cafe and Museum. Talk about a huge chunk of fascinating Kentucky history. And yes, there's a KFC on site; comes with the territory, I guess you could say.

The exhibits and the wide array of memorabilia serve as a time machine and, well, a time capsule of popular culture.

Dave Spencer; Canva

Claudia Sanders Dinner House Auction

If you are a collector and you'd like a piece of a very special chapter of Kentucky history, you won't want to miss the big auction at the Claudia Sanders Dinner House in Shelbyville on July 28th. However, the items up for bid will be available for public preview on July 23rd.

Claudia Sanders Dinner House History

Originally called The Colonel's Lady Dinner House, the restaurant opened in 1968, four years after Colonel Sanders sold Kentucky Fried Chicken and one year before its debut on the New York Stock Exchange. Six years after its opening, The Dinner House was sold to Tommy and Cherry Settle, who changed the restaurant's name a year later.

Colonel Sanders died in 1980, Claudia passed in 1996, and in 1997, the first auction of Sanders memorabilia took place at the Sanders home, Blackwood Hall. The upcoming auction will feature, among other items, the colonel's signature clip-on tie and suspenders, Masonic ring, Kentucky Colonel commission, and personal planner. That's phase one of the auction.

Phase two will be a sealed-bid auction for the restaurant itself and the Blackwood Hall estate.

In fact, it's all on the block...furniture, fixtures, intellectual property, trademarks...the whole shebang. And those sealed bids are due by July 31st. Come the end of the month, some collector is going to be a very happy camper.

[SOURCE: WLKY-Louisville]