So many Valentine’s Day posts! But I never wondered how this holiday was first observed in Salem until I came across an interesting newspaper article from the Salem Gazette in 1823. I just love the description of American “coolness of reason, devotion to secular business, and freedom from superstition” as contrasted with a more passionate England. This was nearly twenty years before the arrival of the uniform penny post in the UK, after which Charles Dickens and his editor W.H. Wills would write of the onslaught of “sacrifices” to St. Valentine, “consisting of hearts, darts, Cupid peeping out of paper-roses, Hymen embowered in hot-pressed embossing, swains in very blue coats and nymphs in very opaque muslin, coarse caricatures and tender verses” passing through the post offices of Great Britain on February 14 in Household Words (March 30, 1850).

Salem Gazette, February 14, 1823.

Several years before Dickens addressed these copious British Valentines, one of them made its way to the Worcester, Massachusetts home of Esther Howland, who was inspired to make her own with her original designs and the materials sold in her father’s stationary store, thus beginning the commercial valentine industry in America. Worcester was the center of this industry for a century, aided by US postal reforms. The valentine story is really a Worcester story, not a Salem story, but it’s interesting to see how quickly Salem stationers picked up this trade. They were not innovators like Howland or her successors, but they jumped on board very quickly, offering a variety of valentines from various suppliers by the late 1840s, as well as materials for those who wanted to craft their own.

Salem Observer, January 29, 1848 and Salem Register, February 9, 1849.

If you search for the word “valentine” in databases of Salem newspapers you will get references to the names of various people, to the Saint, or to Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Fair Maid of Perth (or St. Valentine’s Day) before the 1840s and afterwards, almost exclusively to the holiday and its tokens. That “coolness of reason” observed in 1823 seems to have been abandoned relatively quickly, but Valentine’s Day was certainly not a religious holiday nor one based on “superstition”. And in antebellum Salem and elsewhere, it seems like an observance more than ready to burst out of Salem stationers’ shops.

Vintage valentines from c. 1890-1910 from the Mount Holyoke Valentines Collection ,assembled in memory of that famous Mount Holyoke graduate, Esther Howland.

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