America Once Cloaked in Feed Sacks

In the days of the Great Depression there was no shame in wearing a bag and brightly colored feed sack clothing peppered school playgrounds.

And later, when silks and sprigged-cotton calico were scarce during the rationing of World Ward II, Country America magazine reports, inventive American housewives turned feed sacks into everything from tea towels to trousseaus.

“Now,” says one of the original feed sack seamstresses, Gladys Nichols of Fontanelle, Iowa, “people use them for fun.” And for fancy, too.

Until the 1950s, sugar, cotton, beans, flour and feed were sold in bags made from cotton fabric. American ingenuity--like that which invented the light bulb and the cotton gin--converted these bags into the necessities of life.

They were sewn into clothing and other household items. Sack fabric was used and used again as folks struggled to make ends meet.

Margaret Parsons of Forest Park, Minn. made rompers for a baby sister from 10-pound sugar sacks by cutting holes in two corners of the sack, binding its raw edges and adding a bib and straps.

When bag companies began to manufacture sacks in brightly colored, printed cotton, rural America bloomed as it never had before in paisleys, plaids, florals and border prints.

Bemis Co. Inc. of Minneapolis, Minn., began producing patterned bags in 1940.

“Getting cotton sacks was the only pretty thing we had to look forward to during World War II,” says one farm wife. One sack had vibrant purple plums printed on the front.

During the late ‘40s, extra sacks could be purchased from feed mills for 25 cents each. Later, the price rose to 50 cents a sack, and getting sacks of matching designs became an art in itself.

Farmers’ wives and kids con A talented seamstress could whip up clothes to rival high fashion. In 1950, Bemis sponsored a “Dollars for Dresses” contest to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the mill and the town of Bemis, Tenn., offering a $100 savings bond as top prize for the best dress.

Anna Lue Cook of Germantown, Tenn., says during her childhood days on an Ozark farm, she “wore feed sack dresses and dried my hands on feed sack towels. My family recycled the cotton textile sacks to make almost every item of clothing we wore.”