By Georgia Starley, guest columnist
A note from Sandra Starley: This month I have turned my Covering Quilts column over to a special guest writer, my mother, Georgia Starley, who has a deep fondness for printed feed sacks from the late 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.

I would like to tell you I have a profound love for fabric. Some might even call it an addiction. How long have I had this condition? I believe it started when I was big enough to lift the lid on an old tin trunk in my mother’s room; I could have been three or four. The shelf or drawer had buttons, lace, old cards, rickrack, bone crochet hooks, and tiny bundles of scraps of fabric, and of course, little balls of string. When I got big enough to lift the insert out of the trunk, I found two dolls, an old blue baby book, and the most incredible trim with blue glass beads on it. Well, you get the picture. But these finds just piqued my curiosity; they were not the cause of my addiction. It was the fabric, but not all the fabric. I hated to touch the taffeta; it gave me goose bumps. The fabric I liked was the colorful floral prints. I was hooked. It was years later that I found out they were flour or feed sacks. Did I wear feed sack clothing growing up? I don’t know. All our dishtowels were sacking. My treasures were carried in small sacks.

Twenty years ago, I found a whole group of people with my same addiction. I was bidding against them in auctions. They write books about bags and sell small scraps for big bucks. We meet together and admit our addictions. It was through these groups that I began to learn and understand the history of textile bags.

Up to the middle of the 1800s, products were carried in wooden barrels, kegs, boxes, or tins. Cotton production, the Westward trek, and the great expansion of American farmland gave birth to a new form of packaging and transporting goods. It is much easier to carry bags on the back of a horse than boxes. Early bag measurements were based on the size of a barrel. The weights were in pounds: 196, 48 or 49, 24, or 12.  By the early 1900s, smaller size bag weights were common: 6, 4, and 1-pound bags. In 1943, the U.S. War Production Board ordered bags to be in standard sizes of 100, 50, 25, 10, 5, and 2 pounds. Checking bag weights can help you date or identify your bags.