Definition of "Flour Sack" Dresses of the 1920's & 30's

Mom's class 1933. Mom is in the 3rd row 2nd from right. All her brother's and sister's are in this picture also. This is real similar to the class picture above that was on the website about flour sack dresses.

Today I thought to myself I would like to have a new dress for a Holiday Party we are going to this evening. But really, my closet is full with clothes to wear! This made me think of Mom telling me that her mother made their dresses out of Feed & Flour Sacks. I was a young teenager when she first told me the story. At first I pictured Burlap Gunny Sacks, and thought "how could you wear a dress made out of burlap? Today I decided to find out how they made dresses out of feed sacks and discovered a really cool website telling all about the dresses! I never knew feed sacks came in print patterns

Flour Sacks for Clothes "Repair, reuse, make do, and don't throw anything away" was a motto during the Great Depression. Very few farm families had enough money to buy new clothes at a store. Mothers mended socks and sewed patches over holes in clothes. Clothes were "recycled" and reused as younger children "made do" with hand-me-downs. When farmers brought home big sacks of flour or livestock feed, farm women used the sacks as material to sew everything from girls' dresses to boys' shirts and even underpants. Norma Ehlers says she didn't have a "store-bought dress" until she went to high school. Her mother made feed sacks into dresses. To help the minister's family, Norma's mother sewed dresses for his children, too.



Herman Goertzen notes (see photo) little girls' dresses had the same patterns in the material. He says the companies that made the flour and feed sacks soon caught on and created new patterns on the sacks. "Well, the chicken feed usually came in a patterned material, and the ladies liked to sew at the time." He says most clothes were homemade and the "patterns came from chicken feed sacks, flour sacks I believe. Flour sacks came from the same item." He says it was a sales incentive. "They wanted to sell flour, and if the ladies would like to put patterns on the sacks, sure, that would be the incentive to buy more feed, and it was always probably hard to get the next pattern. The next time you went in to buy a sack of feed, you couldn't get the same pattern."
Millie Opitz (right) remembers sewing the sacks into all kinds of garments. She says they had to recycle the flour sacks, "Cause, Lord, we didn't have no money to spend or nothing."
Written by Claudia Reinhardt and Bill Ganzel, the Ganzel Group. First written and published in 2003.