Necessity is the mother of invention, we are told. The recent economy reminds us of how the mother of all hard times, The Great Depression of the 1930s, turned desperate families into hothouses for creativity and imagination. Times were especially challenging for farmers. Even in the best of times, many farm families often lived dangerously close to poverty.
There were two things 1930s farm wives could always count on: Their good old reliable pedal-powered Singer sewing machine and a determination to make ends meet with whatever was at hand.
Consider Exhibit A as evidence of that: seed sack dresses. You may have never heard of them, but you can bet your grandma or great-grandma of the Greatest Generation knew all about them.
In the early 1930s, everybody was in the same boat. The whole country was flat broke. There was no work to be had. Almost overnight, cash became a rarity. The new motto was, “Make it yourself, make do, or do without.”
Money or not, daily needs still had to be met, such as keeping the family clothed. That was especially challenging for large farm families with many children. Desperate times call for desperate measures, they say. And desperate mothers took matters into their own hands. Literally. They made dresses out of the only thing that was handy.
In that long-ago time before eating out was an everyday occurrence, most wives cooked at home. They also purchased far fewer items at the grocery than they do now. Why buy bread, biscuits and pie crusts when you could bake your own for less money? So they bought flour in 50- and 100-pound bags. Those sacks were made of durable cotton woven so sturdy the contents didn’t seep out. If that was good enough for flour, farm wives figured, it was good enough for clothing.
So they cut up the empty sacks and turned them into dresses. As one woman remembered years later, “The first time I wore one to school, I felt self-conscious about it. But then I noticed most of the other girls were wearing them, too. That was the last I thought about it.”
Seed products likewise sold in bulk to farmers in similarly sturdy 100-pound fabric sacks were also pressed into fashion service.
The practice became so widespread that one historian estimated as many as 3.5 million mothers and daughters wore homemade flour sack dresses during the Depression. And that statistic wasn’t lost on the big mills that produced and sold flour and on seed sellers.
Many began putting their products in cotton sacks decorated with brightly colored floral prints. They even made labels with ink that came off with a good washing, leaving no trace of the fabric’s origin. Soon, flour bags and seed sacks stacked in grocery stories resembled bolts of cloth in dry goods stores.
America eventually clawed its way back to prosperity. In the economic boom that followed World War II, sack dresses were quickly discarded as unwanted reminders of the hardships people had endured. Years later, they resurfaced in the memory of old folks, transformed from symbols of shame into badges of honor. Those homemade dresses exemplified the toughness of people determined to survive the worst economic horror the country had ever experienced.
Resilience is a key component of the American Spirit. Let us pray we never face the test of character our ancestors confronted nine decades earlier. But if we do, let’s also hope that a good supply of flour and seed sacks are on hand to help us get through it. Just in case.
Holy Cow! History is written by novelist, former TV journalist and diehard history buff J. Mark Powell. Have a historic mystery that needs solving? A forgotten moment worth remembering? Please send it to [email protected].
