Henry Sanders and his son, Will began a successful construction business in West Palm Beach . Susan and her sister Rose joined them in the summer of 1897.
Susan was a graduate of a the Kansas State Normal School in Emporia . After passing the teachers examination in Titusville , she was hired at $40 a month to teach school in Leesville, in the woods west of Stuart. She described her life with the Lee family thus:
They all lived in one big room, a bed in every corner, and one between on the two long sides of the room. There were 4 or 5 boys in the family besides 2 young men boarders. I was assigned to sleep with the 12 year old daughter. I said kind of hesitatingly, "Isn't there going to be any privacy for me to retire?" So they went to the boat, got the sail and draped it around my bed. The bed was a home made affair with a 2 by 4 down the middle with barrel staves nailed from it to each side, and the mattress was filled with shredded saw palmetto leaves. By the way, the house was thatched side and roof with cabbage palmetto fans. Where the openings for windows were, there was nothing except a washed out fertilizer sack tacked at the top. We had a wood floor in the house with a long dining table (home made) with a long bench with no back on each side. They cooked in a separate shack.
The regular bill of fare was unsalted oat meal gruel, fried pork, baking powder biscuits, and the bacon grease to go on them for breakfast. For dinner and supper we had black-eyed peas, sweet potatoes and grits.
I taught children, just beginners to some almost as old as I was - for the princely sum of $40.00 per month. I got my board and washing for $10.00 a month.
The teacher at Jupiter had been having trouble with the Trustees and to punish her they sent her out to the little school I was teaching and sent me to the Jupiter school after Christmas.
After marrying, Susan had a cow and raised chickens and ducks for sale. To keep off the hawks, Harry bought her a double-barreled shotgun, and she became a crack shot. She sold her prize-winning guava jellies to the Breakers and the Royal Poinciana hotels in Palm Beach . Harry paid her 25 for every one of his fishing nets that she mended.
Late in 1925 Susan moved to West Palm Beach to care for her 84-year-old father. She died there June 9, 1977 , aged 101 .
Susan DuBois referred to herself and her family as crackers, a word that today designates a person born in either Florida or Georgia but in her day signified a pioneer. In the 19th century, Florida cowboys were nicknamed "crackers" most likely because they popped whips of braided buckskin, 12 to 18 feet in length. The "crack" sounded like a rifle shot and at times was used to signal over several miles.