The First American Valentine's Day Card -- HISTORY's Moment in Media

But it was in Worcester Massachusetts in 1849 173 years ago this month that 20yearold Esther Howland introduced the first highquality massproduced Valentine39s Day cards Her innovation turned into a big business leading to an allfemale assembly line in a thirdfloor room of her family home and eventually earning her as much as 100000 annually from sales That39s more than 3 million todayHowland who could trace her roots to the Mayflower would go on to be known as both quotthe mother of the American Valentinequot and quotNew England39s first career womanquot Mount Holyoke College the women39s college then a seminary from which she graduated in 1847 credits her as likely its first entrepreneur alumna Perhaps due to a singleminded focus on work and ironically given the nature of that work she never married and there is no historical evidence of a romantic interestEuropeanmade Valentine39s cards were available in the United States in the 1840s but they were elaborate and expensive and available to very few Massproduced American cards on the other hand were poorly made and unpopularIn the year she would graduate from Mount Holyoke Howland received a beautiful European Valentine and she had an idea Her father SA Howland was a successful and prosperous stationer and bookseller in Worcester and she persuaded him to order fancy papers laces and ornamental flowers and she began to create designs When her brother went on a sales trip for the family business Howland convinced him to take along samples She hoped he39d find card orders worth 200 instead he returned to Worcester with 5000 worth of ordersBy 1850 Howland had created more designs including more expensive ones A basic card cost 5 cents a version with silk or satin could go for as much as 1 She ran her first newspaper advertisements in the Worcester Daily Spy Her orders doubled and the business kept growing Eventually she created birthday cards and Christmas cards She had agents selling cards for her across the country Each genuine Howland card was stamped with a red letter quotHquotHowland incorporated the business as the New England Valentine Company and in 1879 she moved operations from her home to a factory downtown In 1881 she sold the business to a rival George C Whitney also of Worcester in order to care for her ailing father Howland died in 1904 The Whitney Company then the world39s largest Valentine39s cardmaker shuttered in 1942 the victim of wartime paper shortagesBut Howland39s innovations live on even if her business does not According to Hallmark which first sold Valentine39s Day cards in 1913 and started manufacturing them in 1916 about 145 million Valentine39s Day cards are now sent each year not including the packaged kids39 cards exchanged in elementary schoolsFew of them are as pretty as Howland39s originalsClick the social buttons to share this content with your friends and colleaguesThe opinions and points of view expressed in this content are exclusively the views of the author andor subjects and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet Inc management or associated writers

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The First American Valentine's Day Card -- HISTORY's Moment in Media

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