Mount Holyoke
Valentines From The 1800′s
St. Valentine’s Day is a very ancient holiday indeed. It is named for Saint Valentine, a saint from the Dark Ages, however, ironically, St. Valentine’s himself probably never celebrated love. However, during Valentine’s Day in the 1800′s, there were all kinds of stories about the origins of this special day. It was believed that the festival originated with the Festival of Lupercalia, an ancient Roman holiday. However most modern historians say this simply isn’t true.
Apparently, however Valentines Day was celebrated earlier than the 1800s. According to one source, Samuel Pepys, a writer in London, Valentines Day was being celebrated as early as the 1600s. They were even giving gifts just like we do today.
However, the Valentine’s Day cards that we are so fond of today did not really being to become popular until the 1700s, when people began sending romantic notes for the day (although they used regular paper and did not buy a special card for the occasion).
It was not until Valentine’s Day in the 1800s that special cards began to be come out. By the 1820s or so, they had become quite quite popular in both Great Britain and the United States. It was quite common for the cards to be printed with hearts and bows and arrows and the like just like today.
However, the real beginnings of Valentine’s Day date in the United States to the 1800s and start with a woman named Esther Howland. Howland was a student at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts and she started making cards for the holiday after she received one made in England. Her father owned a stationary store and so she was able to sell them through him. Before long, the business grew into an empire and Esther was hiring friends to help her with the business, making Worcester Massachusetts the center of the Valentine’s Day industry in the United States.
Esther was so successful that by the mid 1850s, everyone was sending Valentine’s Day cards to each other and the editors of the New York Times had had enough of the whole business. They published an editorial on February 14, 1856 calling the practice costly and indecent and wondering why people needed to waste money on such a frivolous thing.
However, in spite of the complaints of the New York Times editor for Valentine’s Day in the 1800s, the industry continued to grow. Even the Civil War couldn’t stop it. People continued to send the missives to their loved ones and the industry became what it is today: A day of love for couples everywhere.
About the Author
Find valentines from the 1800′s on http://www.last-minute-valentine-gifts.net;. Discover the latest update on this topic
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1838 Valley Connecticut Mount Holyoke America Bartlett $17.75 1838 Valley Connecticut Mount Holyoke America Bartlett A Steel Engraved Plate From American Scenery Of Land, Lakes And River, From Drawings By W H Bartlett. Dates C1840, Date If Known In Title. The Overall Scan Size Is 16 X 12 Inches (410 X 310) Size Of Each Plate Varies So Check Against Scale Shown Which Is 0.5 Inch Apart (1.5 Cm) To Find The Size Of The Plate. All Are Genuine Antiques And Not … |
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1881 America Titan Pier Mount Holyoke Elk Lake Rocky $7.75 Old Antique Historical Victorian Prints Maps and Historic Fine Art ———-. 1881 America Titan Pier Mount Holyoke Elk Lake Rocky One Page From The Graphic C1850-1899, The Actual Date Is In The Title Or On The Page Itself. All Are Genuine Antique Victorian Prints And Not Modern Copies. Size Is Approx 15 X 11 Inches (Or 38 X 28 Cm) Or A Little Larger Depending On Year. If This Is Not What You … |
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America Bartlett 1837 View Mount Holyoke River Mountain $17.75 America Bartlett 1837 View Mount Holyoke River Mountain A Steel Engraved Plate From American Scenery Of Land, Lakes And River, From Drawings By W H Bartlett. Dates C1840, Date If Known In Title. The Overall Scan Size Is 16 X 12 Inches (410 X 310) Size Of Each Plate Varies So Check Against Scale Shown Which Is 0.5 Inch Apart (1.5 Cm) To Find The Size Of The Plate. All Are Genuine Antiques And Not… |
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A Joint Concert Recorded Live at Abbey Chapel, Mount Holyoke College, November 18th, 2001 … |
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Pain au Chocolat $2.99 Catherine still had her French accent despite twenty four years in the United States. She was forty two years old, divorced for more than fourteen years, and restless. She had started the ‘Le Café’ business, helped by borrowed money from her aging parents, and worked hard to support her only child. Nowadays, she spent most of her time doing the shop’s accounting and purchasing requirements. She t… |
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Changing Prospects: The View from Mount Holyoke $29.92 Mt. Holyoke, which overlooks the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts, has been a tourist destination and an inspiration for artists and writers for almost two centuries. The view from its summit attracted the Hudson River School artist Thomas Cole among many others, including literary visitors such as Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In 1836, Cole created the most… |
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Mary Lyon and Mount Holyoke: Opening the Gates $24.95 … |
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American Sphinx $10.77 A biography of Thomas Jefferson, written by a professor of history at Mount Holyoke. |
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Encountering the Secular (Paperback) $19.31 Atchley (Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts) presents the secular as an object of philosophical examination informed by the notion that there exists a condition in which the meaning that religion promises is parceled into recognizable traditions and … |
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The Mercury 13 $11.14 THE MERCURY 13 recounts the unsuccessful effort to staff a NASA expedition with 13 female astronauts. Ackerman, a professor of Women`s Studies at Mount Holyoke College, examines the political climate during the Eisenhower and Kennedy eras and how th |
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Destination Dictatorship (Hardcover) $69.03 Examining the tourist boom in Francoist Spain in the 1960s, Crumbaugh (Spanish, Mount Holyoke College) argues that tourism became implicated in Spanish governance through representations of the industry within Spain, narratives of “cultural revolution”… |
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Visions of the Maid (Paperback) $21.5 Blaetz (film studies, Mount Holyoke College) provides a thought-provoking critique of the messages conveyed about women, mothers, and patriotism in Joan of Arc films in the 20th century. Three films are central to the study Cecil B. DeMille`s 1916 Jo… |