WORCESTER—Denise O’Connell gave a PowerPoint presentation last February on Esther Howland, known as “mother of the American Valentine,” during a class at South High Community School.
O’Connell, 70, has long felt a connection to Howland because both were born in Worcester and O’Connell grew up on Howland Terrace off Pleasant Street.
The Museum of Worcester (formerly the Worcester Historical Museum) knows all about Howland, but hasn’t found any documentation that Howland Terrace was named after her or her family. O’Connell said she couldn’t imagine the street being named after anyone else.
“Even if it wasn’t, we thought that it was,” O’Connell said, “and that was important because she was a remarkable, memorable person here in the city. So if it wasn’t named after her, it should have been.”
O’Connell’s presentation explained how Howland mass produced Valentine’s Day cards out of her home on Summer Street in Worcester in the mid-1800s and O’Connell displayed some of the cards. Then the students made Valentine’s Day cards of their own.
O’Connell has loved history for much of her life and serves as a vice president of Preservation Worcester. Last October, the organization conducted a tour of Rural Cemetery where Esther’s mother, also named Esther, is buried. The daughter is buried in Quincy where she lived the latter part of her life with her brother.
Two women dressed up as the Esthers at the mother’s gravesite during the tour and spoke about the Howland family history. About 200 people attended.
For nearly a century, Worcester was the center of the commercial Valentine’s Day card industry. In 1847, the year Howland graduated from Mount Holyoke College, she came across a Valentine’s Day card from England. She was determined to create a better one.
Her father owned a stationary store on Harrington Corner and had access to fancy lace and colored papers in New York. She rounded up friends to assemble the cards at her family’s home at 16 Summer St. It was a private assembly line long before Henry Ford used one to build his automobiles in the 1920s. Howland’s brother worked for the family business and he showed the Valentines to clients. Howland became a successful business owner at a time when few women worked outside the home, let alone ran businesses.
O’Connell said her mother, Pat, who taught elementary school and raised seven children, admired Howland as a successful working woman and described her as a role model to her children.
O’Connell went on to teach at Fitchburg State University and serve as a special education administrator in the Dover-Sherborn Regional School District.
According to Barbara Guertin, chief operating officer of the Museum of Worcester, Howland was the first person to mass produce Valentine’s Day cards.
“No one ever thought of greeting cards before and it was literally her idea,” Guertin said. “So she’s the mother of the greeting card industry. You have to look at her that way.”
“She does not invent the Valentine,” Museum of Worcester executive director William Wallace said. “She popularized the assembled, so-called sentimental Valentine, the multi-layered.”
According to the Museum of Worcester, Jotham Taft and his wife also built a successful Valentine’s Day card business in their home in nearby Grafton in the 1840s. In 1879, Taft’s son Edward partnered with Howland to form the New England Valentine Company on Harrington Corner.
In 1881, George C. Whitney purchased the New England Valentine Company and merged it into the Whitney Valentine Company which he had formed in Worcester with his brother Edward nearly two decades earlier.
Wallace said Whitney made hundreds of thousands of Valentine’s and the company supplied Grants and other large department stores with them in the early 20th century.
The company went on to become the world’s largest greeting card business, but closed in 1942 due to a paper shortage during World War II.
According to a history of Howland published by her alma mater, Mount Holyoke College, her business thrived for 30 years. By 1880, the New England Valentine Company profited more than $100,000, equivalent to about $2.5 million today.
More than 3,000 Valentine’s Day cards, including some from Howland, Taft and Whitney, are housed at the American Antiquarian Society.
Howland never married and Guertin said composer Stephen Murray, who is in residence at the museum, is interested in writing an operetta about Howland and the fact that she never had a Valentine.
As Mount Holyoke pointed out, many biographical records focus too much on the fact that Howland never married and few celebrate her independent achievements or her trailblazing efforts as a woman in business and the arts.
George C. Whitney, the third generation of his family, used to live at 53 Elm St., not far from the Museum of Worcester. Wallace said he asked Whitney years ago why he wasn’t making Valentines and Whitney told him he wasn’t interested in making them and wanted to become a banker. Whitney also told Wallace the company’s equipment would have needed to be upgraded.
Howland came from a wealthy family and ran a successful business. She was born and raised in Worcester, but died in Quincy at age 75 in 1904.
Guertin believes most people who purchase Valentine’s Day cards have never heard of Howland.
“Even in Worcester, they don’t know,” she said. “And she’s a Howland. Her family came over the Mayflower. She’s Boston Brahmin.”
“She’s very popular amongst Valentine collectors,” Wallace said, “but probably the average person doesn’t know much.”
Nevertheless, the city council meets in the Esther Howland Chamber at City Hall.
For 47 years, the Museum of Worcester has held Valentine’s Day card contests for children in Worcester schools in grades 3-6. Prizes will be awarded at the museum’s Fletcher Auditorium at 4 p.m. Monday, Feb. 10, and the Valentines will be displayed at the museum. The children are taught the history of Howland, Taft and Whitney.
“There are people who will come to us and say, “I won the Valentine contest in the third grade,” Wallace said, “and they could be 50 years old. They remember it.”
O’Connell’s two children submitted Valentine’s Day cards in the contest when they attended Flagg Street School.
Bill Doyle has been a professional journalist for 47 years, most of them as a sports writer for the Telegram & Gazette. He covered the Boston Celtics for 25 years and has written extensively about golf, boxing and local high school and college sports. He also worked for the campus newspaper when he attended UMass-Amherst. He can be reached at billdoyle1515@gmail.com
