Local Rivalry Over Valentine's Day Card Origins In U.S.

WORCESTER, MA — When you buy a Valentine's Day card for your sweetheart this weekend, you can thank Worcester's Esther Howland for the Feb. 14 tradition.

Or maybe you should credit Grafton's Jotham Taft.

Although people around the world were exchanging valentines long before the Massachusetts Bay Colony was established, the commercialization of the holiday in the U.S. was born in the Worcester area.

But there's a bit of a dispute over whether it was Howland or Taft who invented the mass-market Valentine's Day card.

According to legend, Howland, whose father owned a stationery store in Worcester, founded the New England Valentine Company in the 1840s to mass produce cards. She got the idea after seeing valentines in her father's store imported from Europe. Other accounts claim she was inspired after receiving a valentine from overseas.

But according to Taft's descendants, the North Grafton resident brought back the valentines card idea after an 1839 trip to Germany. Soon after, he opened the New England Village Company to manufacture cards.

Norman Taft Jr. told WBZ this week his great great uncle actually mentored Howland before she started her own NEVC. But in larger society, it's Howland who gets the credit — the Worcester City Council chambers is even named after her.

"In the mid-1800s, a Massachusetts-based printer and artist named Esther Howland was among the first to produce Valentine’s Day cards in America," the U.S. Greeting Card Association says in its history of the holiday. "Her elaborate designs included multiple layers, lift-up flaps and embossed flowers sure to impress their recipients."

But for all the love she helped foster, Howland never married, according to a biography from her alma mater, Mt. Holyoke College. She stopped making cards in 1881 and died in 1904.

Valentine's Day is now one of the most popular card-sending holidays, with an estimated 145 million given each Feb. 14, according to the Greeting Card Association.