Tobacco Sacks

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.

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

https://www.washingtonruralheritage.org/digital/collection/sanjuan/id/962/

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. 

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.

"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

http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=1B-3A-30E

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?)" 

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." 

http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=6A-FD-193

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.

http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=4C-83-41D 

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.

https://womensworkquilts.blogspot.com/2019/11/tobacco-sack-stringers.html

The woman on the right measures off the yellow string,

the others insert string into the gathered edge at the top of the sacks.

Regional Pattern: Palm Leaf

Here's a distinctive applique pattern based on rotational symmetry,

a scroll-like center shape with tulip-shaped flowers on the north/south

axes and a complex leaf in the corners.

The photo (with a little color correction) is from the North Carolina project, attributed by her descendants to Mary (Molly) Frances Lynch Phillips (1868-1936) who lived her life in Yadkin County, North Carolina. They called it Palm Leaf, which is as good a name as any. Family and documenters date it to last quarter of the 19th century.

 Here's her grave at Find-A-Grave. https://www.findagrave.com/.../1146.../mary-frances-phillips

The design is a good first pattern focus as we covered it pretty well on our Facebook page.

Bill Volckening posted an example he has donated to the International Quilt Museum because

they have another one in the Carlson collection in an almost identical pattern.

Bill's is the one with the extra parts floating in the bottom.

When documented by the NC project it was in the collection of the Wake County Historical Museum in North Carolina. Signed in ink: "Francis" on the reverse. Another photo tells us:

By Julia A Pearce, Randolph County

Collection: North Carolina Museum of History.

Identical to this one except for fading....

From Mark French's ebay store

We found several others with the pierced corner leaves and the tulip.

This one has been recorded several times, sold on ebay as from

Davidson County, North Carolina.

It's an exception to the style rule that the pattern is appliqued of solid color fabrics.

The background here is a white shirting and there is a red print in the sash. The tulip is

a little different too--more like a cotton boll (another topic-another post.)

Dealer Xenia Cord showed it in her booth at AQSG recently.

From a Brunk auction

Almost all the examples we posted were four-blocks,

which means those blocks are rather large---Molly Phillips's is about 35 inches?

And many of them had a pieced sashing.

Another from Mark French, a medallion format exception to the 4-block style. The 12 smaller blocks are missing the tulips. We decided this is probably 1850-1880. The greens in this well-washed and well-worn quilt are fading like overdyed natural dyes rather than the synthetics seen after 1880. 

Then we got into the smaller blocks without the tulips.

Cathy Erickson posted several similar designs in album/sampler quilts from her collection.

No tulips but pierced leaves stitched in reverse applique and the scroll in the center.

The scroll like center often has a square in the center.

We looked for examples of just that center scroll in album quilts and repeat block patterns

but found none.

We did find several examples of the center with other images in the corners

like this one that Kay Triplett posted.

A relative

More relatives with flowers, pineapples and leaves from my Encyclopedia of Applique.

None have names and all were drawn from mid-19th-century albums.

From a Maryland album dated 1846

Maryland Historical Society collection

It appears that the pattern (without the tulips) first appeared in the Southern quilt style we call Baltimore Albums. The symmetries, techniques, fabrics etc. are a common aspect of these quilts that date from the mid 1840s to the mid 1850s---a narrow window of time. The blocks were small; there was little room for tulips.

Cathy Erickson went through the Owen Jones index to classical ornament published in 1856. The Grammar of Ornament groups decorative arts and architectural ornament by culture. The band decorations above are from Greek vases.

Owen Jones notes that most of the various leaf shapes do not represent any particular

plant. 

"Being produced by one or two colours, they all depend for their effect on pure form; they have mostly this peculiarity, that the groups of leaves or flowers all spring from a curved stem, with a volute at either end...."

A volute---a curlicue

Band decoration reformatted in Photoshop for rotational four-way symmetry.

One could have traced a design four ways in 1845.

Cathy wrote: "interesting to see that a number of them have the circular shapes at the bottom of the design. As a quilter I would not try to make individual petals but shortcut to just indentations for each petal."

From a Baltimore quilt made for Sarah Shaffer Weiss,

sold at a Skinner Auction.

It would seem that this applique pattern developed in Baltimore about 1850 when seamstresses there were experimenting with applique designs drawn from classical motifs. The pattern was never very widespread but seems to have inspired more than a few quiltmakers.

The Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts owns this

sampler, recorded by the Massachusetts project that does NOT

look Southern.

In the collection of the American/International Quilt Association.

The four-block from the Carlson collection at IQM.

The design was revived about 1900---bolder, larger and with an added tulip to fill the blank spaces.

Four block without the tulip posted by Lisa Rue Dickson

Lucy Joseph Whitley Hardison (1862-1952), Martin County

North Carolina project

No tulip, no reverse applique.

http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=4B-82-C0

Collector Sharon Waddell posted this quilt top

with a setting pattern similar to  Molly Phillips's at the top

 of the page. The scroll here is four hearts.

Source? Fading greens to dun-colored tan indicate after 1880....

Could be way after 1880, here's an ebay quilt dated 1943---familiar components.

May have been appliqued in 1927, quilted in 1943 as there are 2 dates.

The Palm Leaf would look good in chrome orange and olive-green solids.

Many of us make quilts as well as study and collect them.

It's easy enough to make a pattern of sorts in Photoshop.

Print this out on an 8-1/2" x 11" sheet.

What Have We Learned From the Palm Leaf?

How important classical decorative arts were to what is often classified as folk art.

It's often silly to make a distinction.

Source?

And it is interesting how several of these Southern classic quilts first appear in album samplers in the 1840s' & '50s and then two or three decades later as repeat blocks.

Reproduction made by Susan Cummins Derkacz

of New Braunfels, Texas in 2001. 

https://books.google.com/books?id=oeSNwAbtQhUC&pg=PA157&lpg=PA157&dq=Tobacco+Leaf+Tulip+Susan+Cummins+New+Braunfels&source=bl&ots=80wO9EqXpy&sig=ACfU3U10hxsJm2PfSFQY8-vXkrXx9n2cqw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjM8tWm2ZzlAhUJKa0KHe1aBFAQ6AEwCnoECAkQAg#v=onepage&q=Tobacco%20Leaf%20Tulip%20Susan%20Cummins%20New%20Braunfels&f=false

What is the American South?

Southish

Before we define Southern quilt style we have to define the South---not just by state borders or Civil War history but the cultural South. As Floridian Teddy Pruett said on our QuiltHistorySouth Facebook page:

"Linguistics is a great indicator. I used to tell people that folks who sound southern quilt southern and the quilts follow the accent."

My map above shades Southern into the lower parts of states that might be considered Northern. You might even extend the area west into New Mexico and as far as Bakersfield, California, but this more limited map helps with our definition. Several readers objected to Delaware being in there (only the Southern county of their three counties counts) and there have been objections to Oklahoma, but I am the boss and I have spent much time in Oklahoma and I can tell you it's Southern.

We're using linguistics for our cultural definition:

Dialect: What do you call a carbonated beverage?

Blue: Soda

Green: Pop

Red: Coke (Cocola)

The discussion of the generic name for a can of "?whatever?" was fun and informative.

"What kind of cocola yall want? A NuGrape or a RC?"

Asks Teddy.

My interest in linguistics probably came from moving from New York to Cincinnati, Ohio when I was in grade school (elementary school?) and being ridiculed for calling these sneakers (They were tennis shoes). I'd get abused at school for saying Wash Cloth (Wash rhyming with posh) and at home for saying Warsh Rag. I got good at tailoring the language for the audience. Southerner Tara Miller recalled some spelling problems with Warsh.

Sneakers vs Tennis Shoes

You can see my New York City relatives who moved down there in Southern Florida skewing

the data by calling them Sneakers.

Language scholars use dialect and accent to map culture. The Dictionary of Regional English is one such project. Another is the Harvard Dialect Survey concluded in 2003, which asked a series of questions about word usage (such as What do you call that strip of grass between the street and the sidewalk?) and pronunciation (Crayon.) 

In Wichita they would tell you this garden is in "the parking,"

a useful word for what I called "that strip of grass between the sidewalk

and the street" before I fell in with a crowd from Wichita.

You can see some of the maps developed by Joshua Katz, of North Carolina State University for the New York Times at this site:

https://www.businessinsider.com/american-english-dialects-maps-2018-1#is-mayonnaise-two-syllables-or-three-4

In Kansas where Wichita is South and Lawrence is North

we call these objects Ink Pens or Straight Pins because many people pronounce

the words Pin & Pen identically and there's no sense asking for the wrong thing.

Do note dark blue spot in Southern California.

Okies---to use a politically incorrect term.

Poor Jean Odom, who like me moved around as a kid, had a hard time meeting local standards for pronunciation.

"I was born in Kansas City, Mo. My family were in MO pre statehood out of Virginia, NC and Kentucky. I went to California during WW2 as a 6th grader. I was put in a remedial speech class because I talked like an 'Okie'. Next generation: we moved to Tennessee from NM in 1970. My 4th grade daughter failed her first spelling test. She couldn't hear the difference between pin, pan, and pen nor between iron and arm. My grandmother said 'chimley'. Her mother was from Kentucky. The part of MO where my family settled was known as Little Dixie even when I was a child."

Little Dixie in Missouri

Missouree? Missourah?

Depends on how Southern you are.

I knew a bricklayer once who went to school in Missouri and pronounced it Chimley --- I thought he had a speech defect.

Texan Laura Syler: 

"My very first class my freshman year at Baylor was speech... When we got to our seats our professor (Dr Stokes-The Voice of the Baylor Bears) wrote these words on the board: all, awl, oil, owl, pen, pan and pin. He asked us stand, say our hometown and pronounce each word! It was very enlightening! Especially when a girl from Texarkana-who would be a summer roommate- stretched ALL into 4 syllables!!!"

From the Encyclopedia Britannica

We're talking cultural South....

Which can be linguistically classified into narrower categories.

Iowan Virginia Berger:

"When I lived in East TN, I was fascinated by the differences in accent between East, Middle, and West TN. But I have had people in MN and northern IA tell me that I have a "southern" accent because I grew up south of Hwy 30 in IA."

What Have We Learned from Defining the South?

How important identity is to Southerners. You might get an argument in Iowa if you called Ottumwa Southern, but it's nothing like the arguments we've seen from people who live in the "Deep South" about who gets to be a Southerner---

Poor Oklahoma.