Whitney Valentine, 1887

This card was produced after Esther Howland sold her New England Valentine Company to the George C. Whitney Company in 1881 (owned by Charles Whitney, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA.

Handwritten Valentine poem

Handwritten Valentine poem, "To Susanna", from Cork, Ireland dated Valentine's Day, 1850.

This image of greeting card is in the public domain in the United States. This applies to U.S. works where the copyright has expired because its first publication occurred prior to January 1, 1923. This image might not be in the public domain outside the United States.

Esther Howland Valentine Card

The above image shows a Valentine card produced by Esther Howland in 1850 AD that has the message, "Weddings now are all the go, will you marry me or no". This is a public domain image and you are free to use the above classic beauty of a card by downloading or saving the image to your hard disk.

As Leigh Eric Schmidt, a writer in Graham's American Monthly, observed in 1849 that Saint Valentine's Day had become a national holiday in the United States. The first mass-produced Valentines of embossed paper lace were produced and sold in the United States, shortly after 1847 by Esther Howland of Worcester, Massachusetts. Esther Howland took her inspiration for producing the cards from an English Valentine card she had received. The practice of sending Valentine's cards had existed in England before it became popular in North America. Since 2001, the U.S. Greeting Card Association has been giving an annual "Esther Howland Award for a Greeting Card Visionary."