Weekend Read: Feed Sacks: The Colourful History of a Frugal Fabric, Linzee Kull McCray

In the history of everyday textiles, few materials illustrate the relationship between necessity, design and domestic ingenuity as vividly as the feed sack. In Feed Sacks: The Colourful History of a Frugal Fabric, textile historian and collector Linzee Kull McCray traces the evolution of these humble cotton bags from utilitarian packaging to a widely used household fabric across the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Cover design for The Colourful History of a Frugal Fabric, Linzee Kull McCray

The story begins with a shift in industrial packaging. During the nineteenth century, wooden barrels used for transporting dry goods such as flour, grain and sugar gradually gave way to sewn cotton sacks. The development of the lockstitch sewing machine made cotton bags inexpensive to produce and easier to stack, transport and store. Early sacks were typically plain or simply printed with the names and logos of mills and manufacturers.

Feed sack design from the collection of Janine Vangool. Image courtesy of Uppercase Publishing.

By the early twentieth century the sacks themselves began to change. Manufacturers realised that the cotton fabric could have a second life once the contents were emptied. Printed patterns gradually replaced simple branding, transforming packaging into material intended for reuse. While the term “feed sack” suggests animal feed, the majority of printed cotton bags were actually used for flour, with others carrying sugar, beans, grains, fertiliser and even ammunition.

Excerpt image from The Colourful History of a Frugal Fabric, Linzee Kull McCray

As the practice of reuse expanded, the sacks became an important domestic resource. Three or four matching bags could be stitched together to create a dress, while individual pieces were turned into aprons, children’s clothing, kitchen curtains and quilt blocks. During periods of economic hardship, particularly throughout the Great Depression and wartime years, the fabric offered households a practical source of textile material, and manufacturers encouraged the trend with increasingly elaborate motifs, florals and geometric designs.

Image of feed sack samples from the pages of The Colourful History of a Frugal Fabric by Linzee Kull McCray

McCray’s 544-page volume documents this transformation through extensive visual material and archival research. Hundreds of full-colour swatches reproduce feed sack prints at scale, allowing the patterns to be examined as examples of twentieth-century surface design. Alongside these are trade advertisements, sewing contest announcements, magazine articles and excerpts from industry publications such as Bagology, which discussed the production and marketing of cotton bags.

Personal accounts also appear throughout the book, illustrating how feed sacks intersected with everyday life. Stories include memories of cotton harvesting families, engravers who prepared the metal printing plates used for the fabric designs, and households that relied on feed sack textiles for clothing, quilts and household linens.

Farm girl near Morganza, Louisiana, photographed in 1938 by Russell Lee. Image: Library of Congress. 

By combining design documentation with social history, Feed Sacks: The Colourful History of a Frugal Fabric situates these printed cotton bags within a broader narrative of resourcefulness, manufacturing and domestic creativity. The result is both an archive of pattern and colour and a record of how a simple utilitarian container became embedded in the material culture of twentieth-century life.

Readers interested in exploring the subject further can also turn to the current issue of Selvedge. Issue 129, Repeat, features an exhibition review of Restitched: Feed Sacks in Mid-Twentieth Century Quilts, on view at the Mingei International Museum in San Diego, California, until 10 May 2026.

-

Further Information:

The Colourful History of a Frugal Fabric by Linzee Kull McCray is published by Uppercase Publishing and is available now in the Selvedge Bookshop.

-

Image Credits:

Lead: Image of feed sack samples from the pages of The Colourful History of a Frugal Fabric by Linzee Kull McCray. Courtesy of Uppercase Publishing.

All further images as credited in captions.