Last Saturday, Marilynn Henry presented a program on “Vintage Flour Sack and Feed Sack Garments” to the Windsor Historical Society. To illustrate her talk, she wore a dress made of flour sacks and had examples of feed and flour sacks as well as newspaper articles referring to items made from them.
But some members of the audience had memories of feed-sack garments of a more personal nature. When Marilynn shared an article that praised a woman for making all her children’s underwear, she commented, “I don’t know if I’d want it known that my mother made my underwear from feed sacks.”
To which Tom Colwell of Calhoun replied, “Everybody’s was, so what did it matter?”
Vintage feed and flour sacks are now collectible, Tom said, and sell for $50. Originally, feed came in sacks of rough woven fabric that was “better than nothing, and it was free,” Marilynn said. Gingham Girl sack fabric was an improvement on that, she said, with further refinements introduced when the Staley Milling Company of Kansas City came out with “Tint-Sax” made in pastel shades.
Karen Bullock, who lives on a ranch near Windsor, remembers her mother and her best friend’s mother going through stacks of flour sacks to find matching fabrics to make outfits for Karen and best friend Nancy Windsor. She and Nancy always wanted to dress alike, Karen said, and even had matching bathing suits.
Stamping the company brand on the sack using ink that washed out was a further refinement, Marilynn said. The material was bleached before being made into underwear, Tom said, but sometimes the brand name still showed through. He also recalled going to a local estate sale, where a whole collection of the woman’s bloomers were on display. All were made from flour sacks.
Recycling sacks into clothing became so popular in the mid 20th century that companies started marketing flour sacks for fabric, Marilynn said, along with patterns to make it into dresses. A child’s dress could be made from one sack of flour, one woman in the audience recalled, with housewives usually wanting three sacks of the same fabric to make an adult-sized dress.
Another audience member said that when women went to the feed store, they picked out bags of feed based on the sack fabric they wanted. According to the feed store clerks, it was always the sack on the bottom of the pile, which required moving the heavy sacks to retrieve, then moving more sacks to find one that matched.
By the 1950s, clothing made from feed or flour sacks had their own category at the county fair, Marilynn said.
Marilynn got interested in feed-sack history when she was rummaging around at the Henry County Museum in Clinton, and found drawers of vintage sacks, along with dresses, aprons and household items made from them. She recycled them into a program that reveals an interesting glimpse of the past.
For its next meeting, on Saturday, August 13, the Windsor Historical Society is hosting a 90th anniversary celebration of the International Shoe Factory. Employees and relatives of the factory, which opened in Windsor in 1932, are invited to the celebration. The meeting will be held at the Windsor United Methodist Church fellowship hall and starts with lunch at 12:15 p.m. with the program at 1 p.m., an overview of the factory’s history followed by time for people to share memories.
There is no charge for the lunch of fried chicken and potluck side dishes. Windsor UMC is located at 216 S. Main, Windsor, Mo. 65360. The meeting is open to the public.
The Windsor Historical Society Museum and Research Center is located at 214 W. Benton, Windsor, Missouri 65360. The museum is free and open on Sundays from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Tours may be arranged on other days by calling Dennis Carter 785-224-8956.
