Shelly Zegart donated this quilt of recycled fabrics to the Art Institute of Chicago. She found it in Kentucky. The date on it is now 1930-1945.
https://www.artic.edu/artworks/158438/tobacco-sacks-quilt
As Teri Klassen noted: "A curious concept, celebrating (?) her construction material." Most quilters did their best to disguise the source of re-used fabrics, which sometimes makes it difficult to know the source for the fabrics.
Tobacco sacks or bags are the common packaging for loose tobacco to be smoked in a pipe or rolled into a cigarette. They are stitched along one side and the bottom and gathered at the top where a string (usually yellow) is threaded through a stitched casing.
In the time period we are talking about (20th century up to about 1970) the cotton sacks were manufactured by a few large bag companies (with a good deal of at home work by women) and sold to tobacco companies that added their identification, often with an easily removable paper label. It would be tough to throw away all that cotton cloth so many removed the stitching and pressed the rectangles open to be re-used as unbleached muslin or dyed for patchwork.
How can we tell if a quilt has recycled tobacco sacks in better disguise?
Some family histories tell us, as in one recorded by Teri Klassen, pictured in her book Tennessee Delta Quiltmaking. Verniece Staggs (1915-2002) made the quilt about 1952 in Brownsville, Tennessee according to her daughter-in-law.
Tobacco sacks or bags are the common packaging for loose tobacco to be smoked in a pipe or rolled into a cigarette. They are stitched along one side and the bottom and gathered at the top where a string (usually yellow) is threaded through a stitched casing.
In the time period we are talking about (20th century up to about 1970) the cotton sacks were manufactured by a few large bag companies (with a good deal of at home work by women) and sold to tobacco companies that added their identification, often with an easily removable paper label. It would be tough to throw away all that cotton cloth so many removed the stitching and pressed the rectangles open to be re-used as unbleached muslin or dyed for patchwork.
Sacks for George Washington tobacco were printed with the label
making them less amenable to undisguised recycling.
The patchwork comforter is by Belle Aller of Ohio...
Recorded by the Oregon project and the Quilt Index.
No doubt on the source here.
Collection: Washington state's San Juan Island Museum
The maker left the paper packaging on the Bull Durham sacks and seems to have just laid the sacks front and back on a backing with yellow strings still in place.
"She would take tobacco sacks and unravel them and wash them, and then she would dye them, and she would stack them up until she got enough to piece them together"
"Mrs. Bill Staggs exhibiting a quilt made from tobacco sacks
which she ripped up, dyed, and pieced. Pie Town, New Mexico"
Photo by Russell Lee, 1940
Library of Congress
An unrelated Mrs. Staggs with her own story.
Fannie Cox Blunt (1840-1933) Grand Cane, Louisiana
Louisiana Project
Fannie's granddaughter brought in 4 quilts, this one:
"A 'Sunday quilt' used on Sundays and special occasions. Tobacco sacks hand dyed. Green faded to beige by frequent 'sunning.' (Sun airing?)"
"A 'Sunday quilt' used on Sundays and special occasions. Tobacco sacks hand dyed. Green faded to beige by frequent 'sunning.' (Sun airing?)"
Had she not told the story there'd be no sure way to know the source of the fabrics.
The Louisiana project also recorded this story about a friendship quilt brought in by Eva Graves Pardue who worked on the quilt in 1943.
"Once a month, the twenty members of 'The Golden Rule Club' would meet in the Dean Community of Union Parish, Louisiana....Each lady answered roll call by presenting a quilt block with her name in it. All the blocks were made by the same pattern and most of the light colored fabric in the blocks came from Bull Durham tobacco sacks. The quilt blocks were given to the person who had a birthday in that month."
Nancy Jane Kinyon Thompson's great granddaughter brought this well-used quilt to show the Oregon project.
"In the evenings she loved to sit in her rocking chair smoking her clay pipe....she smoked mostly 'Union Header' and made quilts out of the empty bags."The sacks didn't just come from the male smokers in the family. Smoking tobacco (and using snuff) were common habits among women of earlier generations. Stacy Rawlings recalled her Ozark mountain relatives who "finished each day sitting on the porch together visiting and smoking pipes. That was the 1960s. They only smoked in the evening."
In the 1940s the tobacco sack companies were producing a billion sacks a year and a lot of left-over rectangles.
The rectangles lent themselves well to Brickwork or Brick Wall quilts of rectangles and we can often guess the source by the shapes used.
Puff quilt made of sacks dyed and stuffed by the maker
Effie Roe of Kerrville, Texas
Collection of the Briscoe Center.
Online auction a while ago.
Laura Curl Syler remembered she had a brick top that was never used----
"My grandmother and great-grandmother dyed tobacco sacks pink and blue for my mother's baby quilt. When she was born my grandmother decided the blue just wouldn’t do.... Made in Pendleton, Texas just north of Temple."
Lynn Lancaster Gorges has one too, "made of dyed tobacco bags made by my paternal grandmother."
From John Sauls's inventory
As Terri Klassen observed: "Seems like tobacco sack quilts were a fad or fashion, not just to be thrifty."
Jean Odom who worked in a Tennessee tobacco company in the 1970s remembered colored sacks for bagged tobacco.
"I have red, yellow, white, off white, and blue check bags....Do not make the assumption that colored bags in a quilt were necessarily home dyed."
Quilt by Emaline Savoze Jones of Bedford County, Tennessee.
From the Tennessee project and the Quilt Index.
Her grandson said the fabrics were recycled sacking. The project reports: "Some of the tobacco sacks were dyed by the manufacturer; the grandmother pieced the quilt." Does it mean Emaline is the manufacturer or the tobacco sack company as the dyer? After reading Jean's comment I think they mean the sacks came in these colors.
Recycled materials also included the yellow string from tobacco sacks.
Quilt by Josepha Rodriguez of New Mexico, photographed for Dorothy Zopf's Survivng the Winter: The Evolution of Quiltmaking Through Two Cultures in New Mexico. The yellow ties are saved from sacks.
The tobacco sack industry offered work to women in sewing the bags and in finishing them with the string.
See a story about a North Carolina quiltmaker who stitched sacks as piecework for the tobacco companies in Winston Salem.
https://womensworkquilts.blogspot.com/2019/11/sewing-for-money-in-yadkin-county.html?fbclid=IwAR3MLIyT5cEM7X9DMquPX5CVCLyzuSYEpni3wSC7bTm0iDg0
And a post about tobacco stringing as Women's Work featuring a website from the University of North Carolina.
And a post about tobacco stringing as Women's Work featuring a website from the University of North Carolina.
The woman on the right measures off the yellow string,
the others insert string into the gathered edge at the top of the sacks.
