Esther Howland on the Valentine Business

Did you send a valentine to someone this year? Perhaps it was an ecard or maybe a commercially printed product. Or did you make your own? Meet Esther Allen Howard (1828-1904).

In 1849, a twenty-one-year-old graduate of Mount Holyoke Esther Allen Howland, (1828-1904), a classmate of Emily Dickinson, received an ornate valentine’s card from an English business associate of her father. The card featured paper lace, flower cutouts, and a small green envelope at the center, containing a line of romantic verse. Inspired, she decided to make some of her own.

Howland’s father operated Worchester, Massachusetts’ largest stationary factory and bookstore, S. A. Howland and Sons. At the time, most valentine cards were imported from England and very expensive.

When Howland started her business, Valentine’s Day was becoming a popular holiday in America. Cards were a way couples could acceptably express their feelings to each other.

Sensing the potential salability, Howard slipped twelve of her designs into her brother’s sample case. When he returned with $5000 in orders, Howland knew that her idea of a small home business, appropriate for a single young lady, was out of the question.

Calling on her friends, she gathered four young women in her bedroom and provided them with a model card and the materials. For those women who did not want to leave home to work, she prepared packets of the materials and a sample to be delivered to the home and arranged for the finished work to be picked up.

The following year, 1850, she posted advertisements and began importing special materials from abroad, such as paper lace from Britain, which at the time was not made in the United States. In the early years, simple cards sold for a nickel a piece.

Making valentine cards at Howland’s factory. Source: Worchester Historical Society

But Howland excelled at creating original designs. Embossing, shadow box designs, popups, ribbons, gilt, silk, layers, envelopes and hidden flaps added to the cost, with cards selling up to a dollar a piece. Howland is the originator of the folded card design in which the verse is on the inside which is the format for most contemporary cards. Eventually, she even provided venders with a print-outs of over one hundred 4-line verses, from which purchasers could select and then paste in themselves.

When her orders exceeded the space in her home, Howland moved her business to Main Street in Worchester and named it the New England Valentine Company. The first cards were branded on the back with a red H. This later became NEVco. There she set up one of the first assembly lines in which the women workers each did a different part of the process. Howland prided herself on inspecting every card personally.

With so many couples and families separated, the Civil War proved a real boon to her business. Even though in 1866 she fell and injured her knee, she continued to supervise the company from a wheel chair.

By the 1870s, she was earning between $25,000 and $75,000 a year, a fortune at the time. She went on to produce birthday, Christmas, and other occasion cards and items.