(I recently bought these English and German-made valentines at an auction--sadly, they are not from Howland or Taft.)
Worcester, MA, the once-bustling industrial metropolis 45
minutes west of Boston where I live, is enormously proud of its rather peculiar list of “famous firsts”,
including barbed wire, shredded wheat, the monkey wrench, the birth control
pill, the first perfect game in major league baseball, the first liquid-fueled
rocket and the ubiquitous yellow Smiley Face icon (starring in a soon-to-be-published tell-all book “The Saga of Smiley”, printed by the Worcester
Historical Museum and written by me.)
And every year about this time, you hear about how Worcester
produced the first commercial valentines in this country thanks to a
foresighted young woman named Esther Howland, known as the “Mother of the
Valentine.”
Esther Howland (1828-1904) attended Mount Holyoke at the
same time as Emily Dickinson. She was the daughter of a successful Worcester
stationer and, in 1847, she received a frilly English valentine that inspired
her to ask her father to order materials from England so that she could
assemble her own. She then convinced her
brother, a salesman for the company, to show a few of her valentines on his sales
rounds.
The initial demand was overwhelming and
Esther gathered some of her friends to help her assemble the valentines, seating
them around a long table on the third floor of her home. The company was eventually earning $100,000—a
phenomenal success.
Esther is considered significant because, according to
historians, she was among the first commercially successful women overseeing a
female-run business, and she basically created the assembly-line system, paying
the local women “liberally”.
She introduced layers of lace, three-dimensional accordion
effects, and insisted that the verses be hidden inside--something you had to
hunt for. She had her staff mark the back of each valentine with a red “H”.
In the Victorian era, Valentines were wildly popular, and the
elaborate cards were scrutinized for clues—even the position of the stamp on
the envelope meant something. Often the valentine was intended as a marriage
proposal.
On Feb. 14, 1849, Emily Dickinson wrote to her cousin, “The last week has been a merry one in
Amherst, & notes have flown around like snowflakes. Ancient gentlemen & spinsters, forgetting
time & multitude of years, have doffed their wrinkles – in exchange for
smiles…”
In 1879—after 30 years in business—Esther Howland merged with Edward
Taft, the son of Jotham Taft, a North Grafton valentine maker. Together they formed the New England Valentine
Co. (and their cards were marked “N.E.V.Co.”)
This is where
Esther Howland’s title of “Mother of the
Valentine” begins to get a little shaky.
It seems, upon much study, that Edward Taft’s father, Jotham
Taft of North Grafton, a small village near Worcester, started the commercial
valentine business in the U.S. even before Miss Howland did, but he didn’t like to talk about it, because
the Taft family were strict Quakers and Jotham Taft’s mother sternly disapproved
of such frivolity as Valentines. (Full disclosure—I live in North Grafton,
about a stone’s throw from where Taft worked.)
In 1836, Jotham Taft married Sarah E. Coe of Rhode Island
and two years later, they welcomed twin sons.
But in 1840, one of the twins died suddenly, leaving Mrs. Taft prostrate
with grief. Jotham decided to take his
wife and surviving son to Europe with him on a buying trip for the stationer
who employed him, and while in Germany, he bought many valentines
supplies—laces, lithographs, birds and cupids.
When he returned, Taft began making valentines with his
wife’s help, and in 1844—3 years before Esther Howland graduated from college—he opened
a valentine “factory” in North Grafton (then called New England Village.) But because of his mother’s disapproval, Taft
never put his own name on the valentines—only “Wood” (his middle name) or
“N.E.V.” for “New England Village”. Some
believed that Taft trained Elizabeth Howland as one of his workers before she
opened her own factory
Taft and Howland merged into the New England Valentine Co.
in 1879, and a year later Esther’s father became ill and she left her business
to care for him. After he died, she
moved in with one of her brothers and she passed away in 1904.
Unfortunately, despite all the couples who presumably found
their true love thanks to Esther’s creations, the “Mother of the Valentine”
never married.
In 1881, George C. Whitney bought the combined business of
Taft and Howland and it became The Whitney Co, which dominated valentine production for many
years. Instead of cards laboriously made
by hand, Whitney turned to machine- printed valentines and eventually added postcards
in the 1890’s. The Whitney designs, featuring children who resembled the “Campbell Soup “ kids, were wildly popular,
although more often exchanged by children than adult lovers, and in 1942 the
Whitney factory closed, as a result of wartime paper shortages.
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