Esther Howland is known as the “Mother of the Valentine” for pioneering America’s commercial Valentine-card industry.
Howland was a Worcester, Massachusetts, artist and entrepreneur. After graduating from Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1847, she encountered an elaborate English valentine and saw that similar cards could be made and sold in the United States. She created sample designs using lace paper, flowers, colored paper, and other decorations.
Her brother carried the samples on a sales trip for the family stationery business and returned with orders worth far more than she expected. Howland then organized assistants—many working in an assembly-line system—to produce ornate cards from the family home. Her designs helped make elaborate, European-style valentines more available to American buyers.
Howland did not invent Valentine cards: European handmade and commercial examples predated her. Her importance was popularizing and commercially distributing richly decorated valentines in the United States. Richard and John Cadbury are associated with chocolate, and Joyce Hall with Hallmark, not Howland’s pioneering card business.