The Mother of the American Valentine

I am reading the surprisingly enthralling book, How the Post Office Created America and just met Esther Howland, the 'merchandizer of love'.

Esther Howland was born into a well-to-do Worcester, Massachusetts, family who owned the largest book and stationery store in town. She graduated from Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary in 1847, where she took part in the traditional Valentine’s Day fun of exchanging letters and notes with classmates (which were heartfelt but drab in the 19th century).

At age 19, she got her first glimpse of frilly (complicated), imported European valentines in her father’s store. It was a time when American valentines were as simple as cut paper hearts on which the sender penned a sentimental verse. Esther, recognizing an opportunity when she saw one, set her mind to create romantic, elaborate cards with a lower price tag for the American market. A gifted artist, armed with high-quality stationery supplies her dad ordered for her, she created samples that were an instant success. To produce her complicated card products, and keep up with the high demands that grew, she adopted the assembly-line concepts developed in the early 19th century by manufacturers of firearms, clocks and horse-drawn wagons.

She personally designed each card, hand-cutting individual elements for her employees to copy. Each woman had a task, from cutting paper to trimming cherubs, stenciling, cutting lace, printing verses or adding gilt embellishments. As each completed her task, she passed the card to the next worker in true assembly-line fashion. Howland also reached out to and hired women who preferred to work from home. Oh man, I would have loved that job. Every week each woman received a box carefully packed with all the supplies she needed; a week later the finished cards were picked up for Howland’s personal inspection. According to an 1858 article in Harper’s Weekly, her employees were paid from $3 to $8/week, year round.

With meticulous attention to detail, she transformed simple valentine cards into works of art, embellishing them with silk, satin, bits of embroidery, gilt, ribbons and paper flowers. She also introduced inside envelopes to hold secret messages, love poems, locks of hair or the occasional engagement ring, and pioneered the use of flaps, folds and springs that were the forerunners of today’s pop-up cards.

She is known for a number of innovations in the valentine industry, but maybe the one that shows that she really knew her market was the fact that her cards didn’t come with a motto or verse on the outside. After all, as she knew, your love is unique and won’t always fit with a premade card. “It is frequently the case that a valentine is found to suit, but the verse or sentiment is not right,” she stated. As a solution, Esther’s valentines had a verse on the inside. In 1879, after incorporating as The New England Valentine Co., her company started publishing a Valentine Verse Book that had 131 verses inside it printed in multiple colors. A perfect verse could then be chosen from the book, cut out and pasted over the original verse inside the card. So clever.

With her work in demand and cards shipping from coast to coast, revenues reportedly topped $100,000 annually — the equivalent of $2.6 million today. Within a decade of inception, Americans were mailing some 3 million Esther Howland valentine cards each year. Today her creations are prized by collectors. Ironically, some of Howland’s original valentines are archived at Mount Holyoke College, even though the school’s founder eventually banned students from sending “those foolish notes called valentines.” What timely history.

How oft my bright and radiant eyes

O’erflow with love – and so do thine

How bright the morrow’s sun would rise

Would’st thou, love, be my Valentine

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HAERR TRIPPIN'

The Mother of the American Valentine

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