KinSource - Tale of the Week - St. Valentine's Day Will Bring Many Missives

KinSource

Minnesota Tales

The St. Paul Globe, February 13, 1903, p. 10

ST. VALENTINE'S DAY WILL BRING MANY MISSIVES

Little Is Known of the Saint Himself Save that He Was an Abused Priest of Ancient Rome - Origin of the Day and Its Celebration.

"Tomorrow is St. Valentine's day
All in the morning betime,
And I a maid at your window
To be your valentine."

Nowadays valentines do not peep in at the window. Perhaps they never did. Ophelia, you know, was crazed when she sang that snatch of song. Here in St. Paul, at any rate, the valentine comes in at the front door, disguised in prosaic brown paper wrappings and stamped with Uncle Sam's unsentimental-looking die. Or else it is hidden in a florist's box, carried by a skeptical urchin.

If St. Paul merchants are to be believed, St. Paul girls are going to receive their share of both varieties tomorrow morning. Valentines may differ in outward semblance, but all express pretty much the same sentiment. For instance, cook tomorrow may receive a beautiful paper lace affair, brilliant with purple and blue and green Cupids and aglow with skewered crimson hearts, and the young woman of the family may receive merely a bunch of violets - St. Paul florists say these are the most fashionable valentines this year - but each recipient will not fail to understand that by one, at least she is beloved. No valentine of whatsoever description can convey a stronger assurance. No valentine worthy of the name should attempt to convey less.

Cook's valentine will have poetry concealed some place about it. Perhaps this proposition [will] be made to her:

"If you'll be mine, I will be thyne,
And so good morrow, Valentine."

which is very much to the point, at least, if lacking in those tender exaggerations which delight the feminine soul. But higher education, by which the St. Paul girl has profited, has taught her to despise the Cupids, hearts and verses and to value only flowers or a book, perhaps, or a heart-shaped needle cushion, or some trifle for her writing desk, for St. Paul merchants say that all these things are being purchased this year for valentines.

Little Known of St. Valentine.

Little is known of the saint who is responsible for St. Valentine's day. Hardly more of him is known than that he was a priest in ancient Rome - a town [in] which priests were looked upon somewhat as friars are looked on in the Phillipines today. For being a priest he was taken into the lots, incontinently whacked with clubs, and then beheaded. What was left of him after the gentle citizens of Rome were through was preserved, and is at this moment resting in the church of St. Praxedes in Rome, where one of the old city gates was long called the Porta Valentine. Now, what had this worthy old man to do with the practice of sending love letters on one day of the year that were more expensive than those dropped into the mails on other days - those involving subsequent breaches of promise excepted? Nothing. The chances are that he never sent such a thing in his life. May be that was the reason they killed him.

But in February they celebrated the feasts of Pan and Juno, the high jinks that are called the lupercalia, and in these doings young men drew from a common box the names of young women, who were supposed thereupon to pair with them. When the early Christians came into power they knew that the commoners would not take kindly to sudden change, so they softened the transition from pagan to Christian thought and manner, and they organized a new feast to take the place of the lupercalia, omitting the ceremonies and privileges that had made that occasion one of wild interest, and the new doings, which were a sort of Sunday school festival and church fair, happened on St. Valentine's day.

The first valentines were written; indeed, all of them were until the last century. In 1826, however, the practice of sending them had grown so general that 200,000 more letters than the average passed through the London postoffice on St. Valentine's day. And London was not so much in those days.

First Valentine in United States.

The oldest of these missives in the United States is in Cleveland, Ohio, and was addressed to Miss Sarah Brett, in 1790. The British museum has one almost like it, in the hand of the same fickle youth who affected to admire Miss Brett. It is a sheet a foot in dimension, folded into squares of four inches, sealed with a red heart, and in pale ink are these lines around it:

When you hear this harte, behold
"Twill break as you these lines unfold.
The power of envy cannot pretend
To say I have fals verses pend.
For on the inside, sweet turtle dove,
I've wrote the morals of my love.
Thou art the maid amd only maid
That has my honest harte trapad.

This was your average valentine till 1825, when they invented some in England that did not require so much brain sweat. Now you merely sweat your pocketbook to tell your story. But printed ones wouldn't go with the Yankees. They lacked sentiment to a degree that made them seem even improper because the printer read what you were going to say.

Miss Howland Started It.

However, in 1849, Miss Esther Howland added to the stock of her father's bookshop in Worcester, Mass., a few valentines. She cut out the now cheap and common lithograph pictures and pasted them on common letter sheets, scolloped the edges, got a young brother to copy verses in a round hand and so started the valentine business in America. She had just come out of Holyoke college, and who shall say that a college education is not a good thing for women? These things were snapped up, they were sent to New York by the dozen and demands came for thousands. Miss Howland's father ordered pictures and embossed paper, four girls were installed in his house, who were kept busy tying ribbons and frills and cutting out sheets, and the kid brother became a drummer and prospered exceedingly. Enamel pictures from Germany were imported, then the cutting, which had been done laboriously with scissors, was done quickly with dies, and before Miss Howland knew what had happened she was making $50,000 a year. She had discovered a want and had made a trust of herself.

Then an enterprising business man of her town bought out her business and that of two or three houses which had started up in New York, and he continues the making of valentines right where they started. His company was incorporated in 1894. He has 400 people working for him, and covers 55,000 feet of floor space with machinery appliances and working room. He is continually enlarging his premises, and has not room enough yet, for as the nation grows, orders for his wares become more frequent. He puts out millions a year and cannot fill all of his orders. His is the largest factory in the country, if not in the world.