A Valentine’s Day Card from Boston

While the tradition of giving valentines dates back to medieval England, it was not until the 1860s, thanks to Boston printer Louis Prang, that multicolored romantic greeting cards were mass-produced by machine. You may recognize the name Louis Prang from the street, named after the German Emigrant in the Fenway neighborhood. Before Prang perfected the chromolithographic process, which involves transferring colored lithographic ink drawings directly onto stones and then pressed onto paper, multicolored prints were hand drawn. With his new innovation, Prang could print up to 20 colors onto his valentines. In 1860, Prang fled Prussia to Boston, where he and a partner set up a Boston-based printing company specializing in lithographic prints of buildings and towns around Massachusetts. While his legacy is better known as the “Father of the Christmas Card” (by 1882, he sold five million Christmas cards annually), Prang began manufacturing and selling valentines as early as January 1868. L. Prang and Company merged with another business to become the Taber-Prang Company in 1897 and moved to Springfield, Massachusetts.

Prang popularized the use of chromolithography for valentine production in the U.S.; however, he was not the country’s first distributor of valentines. Another resident of Massachusetts, Esther Allen Howland, is recognized as the “Mother of the American Valentine.” After receiving an intricate card from her father’s business associate at her Worcester home in 1849, Howland became inspired to create her own. Employing single women and widows, Howland created an assembly line of handmade valentines. In 1881, Howland sold her business to George C. Whitney, who expanded the company to develop a variety of themed holiday cards.