With less than two weeks until Valentine’s Day, a Lynchburg woman is working overtime – sharing her collection of historic valentines with the public and teaching a class on the origins of those fancy love notes.
Mary Kathryn McIntosh got interested in old valentines when she inherited one from her grandparents – an elaborate, handmade card from a Civil War soldier who would die in battle. Since then she has acquired several lacy valentines popularized in 18th century England.
“Charles Dickens actually visited the company where they made this paper lace, and there were spies sent in to try to figure out how to do it, and we tried to do it in America, but ours didn’t work out as well, because we had too much rag content in the paper, so it didn’t cut right.”
Many other cards would come from Germany. “Germany printed most everything for Europe and for us, and actually many of the firms were Jewish firms, and there was a way to convert the Jewish new year card into a valentine with very few changes, so you might get one that has a little bit of German on it.”
But it was the Americans who turned Valentine’s Day into a commercial hit, beginning with Esther Howland of Wooster, Massachusetts, who graduated from Mount Holyoke in 1847.
“Someone brought her a really elaborate valentine from England, and she decided she could duplicate that, so she went down to New York City, bought supplies, made a few, sent her brother out and was hoping for $200 worth of orders. He came back with $5,000 worth of orders.”
To fill those orders, she hired her friends to craft valentines on a kind of assembly line, long before Henry Ford had the idea. “She had a stagecoach that would come around and pick the valentines up and move them from one house to the next.’
She sold simple cards for five cents, but those that included ribbon, hidden doors, gilded lace, and tiny envelopes for secret messages, locks of hair or engagement rings sold for as much as $50. And then there was the New England Candy Company – creator of Necco Wafers, which today makes more than 100,000 pounds of what were once called Conversation Hearts each year.
“They started out with a paper cover on the candy that had little sayings on it, and then they figured out how to imprint that on the candy hearts, and every year they have a contest and they add a few more to the hearts and they take a few away.”
Old fashioned sayings like Be Mine and Yes Dear remain, there are some newer options from Necco and other candy heart makers. Among them: Awe-some, BFF, Friend Me, Game On, Sup Babe, Text Me and You Rock.
In addition to expressing affection, McIntosh says you can find so-called Vinegar Valentines in the archives – messages sent to people you didn’t like, and valentines that American companies used to send to their customers.
She’ll host a workshop on making valentines tomorrow at Pharsalia – a Nelson County plantation house built in 1814, before valentines were hot in America.
