Fast Feud: The Day Colonel Sanders Fired at a Competing Gas Station Owner

On May 7, 1931, Matt Stewart was in the middle of defacing a sign on a concrete wall in Corbin, Kentucky, when a vehicle arrived with three men inside.

“Well, you coward, I see you’re ruining that sign again,” one of them growled.

Stewart likely didn’t need to look to recognize the voice. It was his arch-rival: Harland Sanders. Guns were drawn, bullets flew, and by the end of the confrontation, one man lay dead.

Who Really Owns the Sign?

During the time of the shooting incident, Harland Sanders was far from establishing Kentucky Fried Chicken (now simply known as KFC) or earning his honorary colonel title. However, he had already embraced the entrepreneurial drive that would later enable him to create a fast food empire from scratch. In the early years of the Great Depression, he began managing a Shell gas station in Corbin and quickly started advertising it on barns throughout the area. 

While billboards were an option, they were frequently targeted by Corbin’s gun-loving residents. North Corbin, in particular, was so notorious for gun violence that it earned the nickname “Hell’s Half-Acre.” However, barns were a safer choice for advertising, as shooting at them risked harming any animals inside. When Sanders noticed a concrete wall along U.S. Route 25, just a short distance from his station, he transformed it into another advertising platform. His sign featured a large arrow with the words “North to Lexington,” signaling drivers that gas was available nearby.

However, guiding drivers to Sanders’s station also meant diverting them from Matt Stewart’s nearby Standard Oil station. Claiming the sign was on railroad-owned land, Stewart covered it with a hard-to-remove, tar-like material called creosote. Sanders fixed the damage and immediately confronted Stewart. The encounter turned hostile; as recounted in The Colonel, John Ed Pearce’s biography of Sanders, one or both men threatened to “blow your goddam head off.”

Tensions were already simmering when, early on May 7, a young boy arrived at the Shell station and informed Sanders that Stewart was once again defacing his arrow sign.

Stewart’s Final Confrontation

Sanders decided to confront Stewart again—this time, he brought company. Shell district manager Robert Gibson and Shell supervisor Carlyle Shelbourne (sometimes spelled “Carlile” or “Shelburne”) were at the station that morning and joined him.

Details vary about how the chaos unfolded after the group caught Stewart on his ladder, but Gibson appears to have stepped out of the car and approached Stewart first. It’s uncertain who drew or fired their weapon initially, though Stewart insisted it was his adversary. When Gibson’s gun misfired, Stewart seized the opportunity to protect himself.

And protect himself he did. He shot Gibson multiple times, causing him to collapse instantly. Shelbourne then reportedly drew his firearm, while Sanders grabbed Gibson’s weapon (or his own, according to Stewart’s account), and both men shot Stewart twice.

The shots stopped Stewart’s assault but weren’t fatal. Gibson, however, wasn’t as fortunate—he died before reaching the hospital. This turn of events was disastrous for Stewart, who was charged with murder. After recovering from his injuries and standing trial in October 1932, he was found guilty and sentenced to 18 years in prison. 

His misfortune didn’t end there. In July 1933, while out of prison awaiting an appeal, Stewart was shot and killed by a deputy sheriff who had come to arrest one of his employees. The circumstances were unclear, and rumors suggested Gibson’s family had hired the deputy to eliminate Stewart.

Blood May Be Thicker Than Water—But Fried Chicken Trumps All 

As for the man who would later become the face of KFC: The shootout barely left a mark on his reputation (partly because newspapers referred to him as “H.D. Saunders” or “H.C. Saunders” in their coverage). Charges against him and Shelbourne were dismissed, and Sanders went back to his Shell station, where he quickly opened his first restaurant.

His connection to the Stewart family didn’t end there, however. Stewart’s daughter, Ona May, married a brother of Claudia Price, who would later become Sanders’s second wife in 1949. Price began as a waitress for Sanders and eventually rose to manage his second Sanders Court—a combined restaurant and motel—in Asheville, North Carolina.

Ona May followed a similar path: Sanders employed her as a waitress and later promoted her to manage his original Sanders Court in Corbin during and after World War II. She took a short break to operate her own downtown restaurant but eventually rejoined the Colonel’s team, co-owning one of his establishments in Lexington, Kentucky.

“I always knew I could rely on him,” she remarked, as quoted in Pearce’s The Colonel. After all, he had always been someone who shot straight.