Sacks and Their Many Uses 2007

Many years ago about this time the planting on the farm would be completed and ladies would now be trying to get that stubborn black lettering out of the sacks.  Ladies used all kinds of methods for letter removal — soaking, scrubbing and rubbing on the rub board, but nothing caused the black lettering to budge.  This wouldn’t remove lettering, but it was said that if clothes were left hanging on the clothesline overnight and let the May dew fall on them it would whiten them. We own quilts to this day that still have the lettering on the linings and they are many years old and have been washed over and over.  Two years ago John and I did a quilt program in Niceville, Florida and when we showed an old quilt with lettering still intact you would have thought we were showing some expensive work of art.  All the oohing and aahing done by that group was unbelievable.

There was a time when lots of commodities came in fabric bags or sacks.  Salt even came in a little fabric bag, as did sugar and flour.  In one quilt I have there is a one-hundred pound sugar sack and on the sack it states that inside there were ten ten-pound sacks of sugar.  The same quilt has a Talmadge Farm sack that held a ham.  Herman Talmadge, former governor of Georgia, had a farm that sold hams, etc.  Another sack was one John bought clover seed in when we first bought this farm in 1978, while another sack in the quilt had held bird seed.  One of the sacks came from the mill in Geraldine that made corn meal.

In doing the quilt programs I try to take a sack of each variety to show.  It’s hard for me to remember that young folks don’t have a clue about sacks – and it’s old hat to me.  Fertilizer sacks are the coarsest and roughest of all.  They were used for towels, sheets, ets.  But one man who grew up this community told me his mother made his underwear out of those old rough sacks.  He said they would be working in the field and get hot and sweaty and the rough-sack underwear would be so scratchy.  He’d go to the woods and take the underwear off and keep plowing – or whatever he was doing in the fields.

Flour sacks were the softest sacks of them all.  They had so many uses.  Some ladies would bake tea cakes and store them in flour sacks.  My mother used flour sacks for dish clothes, pitcher clothes and straining clothes (she had to strain the milk when it came from the barn).  Many times we would embroider a design on them and some times Mother would crochet an edging.  Some ladies used the raveling strings from sacks for their crocheting. When I was doing one of those quilt programs in Cartersville, Georgia a lady told me her mother used flour sacks to make her under drawers and on the bottom the lettering said, “Southern Best.”

Chicken and/or cow feed came in printed bags and lots of wearing apparel was made from those.  In the 1940’s and ‘50’s lots of farm wives and children wore sack clothes.

The feed sacks would laundry so well.  Starched and ironed dresses were very pretty.My sister made her son’s shirts for years – used sacks when he was little, then used plaids when he was in high school.  When he went to Auburn she thought it was time for them to buy ready-made shirts, but he complained.  He said the ones she made wore better.

It took three feed sacks to make an adult size dress and if you had two sacks just alike and your neighbor had one – you would swap her another sack for the one you needed to make your dress.

John’s Aunt Myrtle used to tell about her feed sack dress – it was white and she had pulled threads just above the hems in the sleeves and bottom.  Then she ran red embroidery thread in those places.  She said she would wash that dress on Monday, iron it on Tuesday and have it ready for the next Sunday.  It was the best dress she had and I’m sure it was pretty.

Pillow cases, dresser scarves and small table clothes were other items made from those pretty feed sacks.  Embroidery designs were worked on the pillow cases and scarves and then crochet edging sewed around the edge.  They also were the right things for doing pulled thread work – such as hem stitching – since they were “even weave” material.

If a neighbor had a design that someone wanted, an industrious lady could lay a sack down on top of that embroidery design (in just the spot where it was to be worked), rub a snuff box lid on her hair and then rub it over the design – transferring the design to the new sack so it could be embroidered thereon.  This was in a day when ladies starched and ironed pillow cases and such.

Doing this reminds me that I have some printed feed sacks that I want to do a quilt from – somebody else told me they had sacks they would add to my collection.  I must get to that chore.  Anyway the memories of sacks just keep flowing – this is only a few memories of how it was with that style of country living.