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| Feedsack dress, courtesy National Museum of American History |
By Marilyn Turk
The Christmas festivities are here and we reach back
into our closets for that holiday wear that only comes out in December. For
many of us, it’s the only time of the year we wear red.
Children are decked out in their special jolly clothes
for church or to take pictures with Santa. Little boys may be seen wearing ties
and vests while little girls twirl in satin, taffeta or velveteen.
But what did people wear in the Depression? What
festive clothes did they have? Many mothers couldn’t afford store-bought
clothes, so they made their children something new to wear out of something
they already had – like flour sacks.
By the time I came along, the store my grandmother ran
was no longer in business. However, it was attached to her house, so I strolled
through the mostly-empty store looking into vacant glass cases and bare
shelves. That’s the first time I saw it. On one shelf there was a stack of fabric
in various prints. I liked the prints, but when I touched it, it was rough and
stiff. My mother explained to me that they were old flour sacks that people
used to buy from Grandma to make clothes. I looked at Mother like she was crazy and
said, “I wouldn’t want a dress made out of that scratchy stuff!” Mother laughed
and told me it wasn’t too bad after it had been washed a few times. I doubted
it would ever be soft like my clothes though.
And yet, in the Depression, people were just happy to
have something new. Women made shirts for boys and dresses for girls out of the
material that flour and other goods came in. Even feed sacks were used to make
a variety of household items like curtains, quilts, towels, and even underwear
and diapers!
When the flour mills found out how the bags were being
reused, they began making the bags in color and then added lively prints.
Manufacturers even pasted on paper labels so they’d be easier to remove than the
stamped-on labels. By the 1930’s, manufacturers competed with each other by
hiring artists to design the prints. The trend was great marketing, and more
companies that sold their products in sacks caught on. Women often chose their
flour, sugar, beans, rice, cornmeal, feed and fertilizer, based on which
fabrics they liked the best.
Not only were women being thrifty, they were helping
the government during a cotton shortage.
After the war, rural women showed off their homemade fashions by
competing in national sewing contests. Farmers often found out they had more
feed sacks than they could use, so they were able to sell them back to the
store to be resold. I wonder if that’s where my grandma got hers?
Magazines and pattern companies took advantage of the
sack popularity and published patterns specifically for feed sack prints.
Directions were even given for using the strings from the sacks in knitting in
crocheting.
And it wasn’t only poverty-stricken families wearing
these garments. A 1942 estimate showed that three million women and children of
all income levels wore them.
However, as technology advanced, largely due to the war
itself, many items were no longer packed in cloth bags. Paper and plastic was cheaper
to produce and more sanitary and rodent-proof, and a new man-made material
called rayon appeared on the market. Cloth bags practically disappeared, and
clothes made from them disappeared as well.
Did you ever have a flour-sack dress or know someone
who did?
A
multi-published author, Marilyn Turk writes historical fiction about the coastal
South. Her fascination for lighthouses spawned her popular weekly lighthouse
blog @pathwayheart.com, and inspired her upcoming Coastal Lights Legacy series
and her Lighthouse Devotions. Her novel, A
Gilded Curse, will be released March 2016 from Heritage Beacon Fiction, an
imprint of Lighthouse Publishing of the Carolinas.
Leave a comment (and your email) for a chance to win a copy of our brand-new book, Lighthouse Devotions.
May you have a very blessed Christmas!
May you have a very blessed Christmas!
