Several years ago, my cousin, Mary Turner, gave a presentation at the Oak Grove Historical Society about “feed sack dresses.” She was an expert on the subject and also collected feed and flour sacks. Apparently, it took three feed sacks to make an adult woman’s dress. Flour sacks were white, made of a softer cotton material, and were used for undergarments and pillow cases.

I decided to do a survey so I went in to a local restaurant and asked four younger women sitting at a table if they had ever heard of a feed sack dress. They looked at me like I was nuts, and said something I couldn’t understand. That ended my taking a survey.

The highlight of my life when I was small was going to town on Saturday night. The first stop would be the produce store, where we sold our eggs. My mother would buy the chicken feed and pick out the prettiest sack it came in. Seed companies back during the Depression and through World War II discovered the best way to sell their feed was to put it in a sack with all kinds of designs that women could use to make dresses. My wife, Laura, said they only had enough money to buy one sack of feed at a time, and if the next week when they went in to buy another sack there was not the same design, her mother had to make a blouse out of the one sack, instead of a dress.

Laura also said it was a big event when she was big enough to require a two sack dress. Her mom even made shirts for her brothers out of the sack material. The feed and flower sacks had their brand name printed over the design with red ink that was easily washed out.

I ran this article in 2013 and received over 1,000 replies from people who remembered wearing feed sack dresses.