How Esther Howland Invented Valentine’s Day as We Know It
Esther Howland helped to define love by creating the first commercially mass-produced Valentine’s Day card in the United States in the mid-1800s. In the process, the ‘Mother of the American Valentine’ helped usher in a $20 billion holiday.
The U.S. Greeting Card Association estimates that approximately 190 million Valentine’s Day cards are sent each year in the U.S., with Hallmark alone making 1,400 different valentines. But in the 1800s, valentines were a far different affair of the heart. Back then they were usually a cheaply made token of love, a few lines of rhyme on a slip of paper, often selected and printed and sold by shopkeepers.
That changed thanks to Esther Howland, a 20-year-old graduate of Mount Holyoke College living in Worcester, Massachusetts, who ushered in what is now a $20 billion holiday. Known as the "Mother of the American Valentine," Howland is credited with the commercial mass production of valentines in the mid-1800s.
Howland’s father owned a large bookstore in Worcester that stocked richly designed and lace-covered cards from England. Overseas, the holiday was much more popular and commercialized. Howland copied the British card style. Her fancy handmade cards of paper, lace, and ribbons would forever change valentines.
In 1849, she created well-received prototypes. Setting up headquarters in her family’s Worcester home, her New England Valentine Co. sold cards for as little as 15 cents and for as much as 75 cents, an enormous amount at a time when the average American worker made less than a dollar a day. Yet love knows no bounds or budget, it seems. Late in life, the Boston Globe placed her company’s annual sales between $50,000 and $75,000 a year, an impressive sum at the time.
While she successfully commercialized love, Howland apparently never found love herself, dying in 1904 unmarried at her brother’s home. Newspapers across the country reported on her passing, labeling her, variously, as “the inventor of valentines” and, rather harshly, as a “New England spinster.”
And yet, like true love, Howland’s legacy has endured. So-called Howland valentines are treasured by collectors. A Christie’s auction sold six for between $94 to $489. What’s more, a selection of her work resides alongside some of the greatest artwork in the world at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
For more information on valentines, visit the American Antiquarian Society, which has a collection of over 3,000 valentines ranging in date from the 1830’s to 1900.
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Paul Kennedy is Editorial Director of the Collectibles Group at AIM Media. He enjoys Mid-century design, photography, vintage movie posters and people with a good story to share. Kennedy has more than twenty-five years of experience in the antiques and collectibles field, including book publishing. Reach him at PKennedy@aimmedia.com.
