Valentines in the American Antiquarian Society’s Collection
There are over 230 institutions that have contributed historical materials to Digital Commonwealth’s online collections. These institutions have selected materials that they have determined would be appropriate to enhance the whole of what is available on the Digital Commonwealth website. But in many cases, the collection or collections that they have elected to share with Digital Commonwealth are only a taste of their entire holdings.
The American Antiquarian Society is a perfect example. “The AAS library today houses the largest and most accessible collection of books, pamphlets, broadsides, newspapers, periodicals, music, and graphic arts material printed through 1876 in what is now the United States, as well as manuscripts and a substantial collection of secondary texts, bibliographies, and digital resources and reference works related to all aspects of American history and culture before the twentieth century.” AAS selected 140 maps not duplicated in Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map Center collection, out of their 10,000 maps, to be made available as a Digital Commonwealth collection.
That said, “the American Antiquarian Society has a collection of over 3,000 valentines ranging in date from the 1830’s to 1900. The collection includes both manuscript and printed designs, with a strong representation of locally-produced cards made in Worcester.” AAS has created an online exhibition, “Making Valentines: A Tradition in American.”, providing an overview of their extensive collection. “Victorian Valentines: Intimacy in the Industrial Age”, a collaborative student project between AAS and the Smith College Department of Art, provides an additional opportunity to explore the collection.
Worcester was the home of two of the pioneers in the production of commercial valentine cards in the nineteenth century.
Esther Howland (1828-1904) was considered the “Mother of the Valentine.” Howland was a cousin of Emily Dickinson; she set up her business in a workroom in her family home. With the help of a number of local girls, her business thrived for 30 years, with sales of $75,000 per year.
“True Love” with Piper. Worcester:Esther Howland, ca. 1860.
Another Worcester native, George Whitney established a valentine manufacturing company that prospered from 1866 to 1942. It was considered one of the largest valentine publishers in this country, with offices in New York, Boston and Chicago.
A portion of AAS’s valentine collection includes a sub-genre, the comic valentine, also known as the Vinegar Valentine. “In sharp contrast to the sweet and sentimental valentine, caricatures were often cruel and the humor venomous, expressing everything by love.” “Lyre (liar)” is an example of this kind of valentine.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the Boston lithograph firm, Louis Prang & Company, was also in the greeting card business. “Commissioning the country’s best illustrators and creating design competitions, Prang sold beautiful cards that were unmatched for years. He also created fun and interesting cards for almost every holiday of the year,” including Valentine cards.
In 2002, Verner and Deborah Reed gave Historic New England 26,000 negatives encompassing Reed’s work as a freelance photographer in the third quarter of the twentieth century. His photographs include “portraits, landscapes, and images capturing special moments and current events, document[ing] urban and rural life in New England from the 1950s to the ’80s.” This gift greatly expanded Historic New England’s mid-twentieth century’s photography collection.
The following short biography comes from an article by Nancy Wolfe Stead, “The Life and Times of Verner Zevola Reed III” in the Stowe Guide and Magazine, Summer/Fall 2021, p.86-92. Nancy Stead knew Verner Reed personally during his years in Stowe, and recounts from memory numerous episodes of “mayhem, fun, and outlandish enterprise”.
Verner Reed, “furniture maker, sculptor, jeweler, and photographer, was born in 1923 in Denver. . . Verner’s early years were spent in New York, Boston, and Stowe, where his father had built Edson Hill Manor as a wedding present for his wife. Following World War II and a stint in the U.S. Army Air Corps in Burma, China, and India, he became a builder of fine, handcrafted furniture. Marketing his product introduced him to the camera, and photography quickly became his passion.
A chance meeting with a LIFE bureau chief at a 1953 rally in Boston before the impending execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg opened an immense new arena for Verner. He became a freelance photographer for LIFE and, as his skills and interests deepened, he added Fortune, Paris Match, Time, and regional publications such as Vermont Life and various newspapers to his roster. He always worked freelance, refusing to be tied down, and he chose his subjects, exploring and exalting in the streets, neighborhoods, celebrations, losses, and people of his world.”
In Brunswick Hotel, the featured image at the top of the blog post, “Reed clearly relished the simple irony that emerges between the decorum maintained by the sitters and the decrepitude of their environs. Yet, his chosen moment reveals a final twist: these Bostonians recognize their situation; they celebrate long-standing traditions even as they acknowledge changing times.”*
Verner Reed’s work in photography is informed by his times and his surroundings, rooted in New England. It is also clear that he has taken to heart Henri Cartier-Bresson’s definition of photography written in the text accompanying the iconic work, Images à la sauvette / The Decisive Moment (1952). “Photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.” **
Reed cultivated a photographer’s eye. In The Photographer’s Eye, based on the Museum of Modern Art’s 1964 exhition showcasing the history of photography, John Szarkowki wrote, “Photography alludes to the past and the future only in so far as they exist in the presnt, the past through its surviving relics, the future through prophecy visible in the present.”*** Verner Reed was always conscious of this elusive aspect of time.
In 1960, Verner Reed stopped to take a picture of a family in their yard in Northern Vermont. According to the description accompanying the photograph in Historic New England’s collection, “they asked for a minute to tidy up. The mother did not feel that she had enough presentable clothes for all of her children, and made some of them stay indoors–they can just be seen looking out the window.” Twenty five years earlier, Walker Evans had taken a series of pictures of George Burroughs and his family during the Depression in Hale County Alabama. The similarity of these two images is remarkable.
Ever the alert street photographer, Reed captured an image of a man enthralled by the sculpted head of a woman at the Boston Arts Festival in 1954. A year later, Norman Rockwell painted what looks like this man’s twin brother in a similar quizzical state for the cover of the April 16 Saturday Evening Post. The resemblance might be a coincidence, but it serves to highlight that both artists are reaching for that “decisive moment”, in this case in two very different mediums. Reed’s work is more contemplative, not aiming only for a quick laugh.
Tree Branches and Soaped Window, both dated in the early 1950s, provide evidence that Reed was cognizant of what was going on in the art world outside of New England. Painters who came to be called Abstract Expressionists were creating a body of work that was shifting the focus of the art world from Paris to New York. The abstract nature of the patterns created in Verner Reed’s photographs echo Robert Motherwell’s ink, watercolor and pencil drawings in The Mexican Sketchbook (1941) as well as Motherwell’s later starkly defined black and white paintings.
Historic New England and Digital Commonwealth
Historic New England’s mission is to “save and share New England’s past to engage and inform present and future generations.” Like any similar institution, Historic New England’s job encompasses preservation and access. Reed’s gift of his 26,000 negatives gave Historic New England the opportunity to preserve and catalog the images, to mount a number of exhibitions, and to publish an exhibition catalog. Anyone with a Massachusetts public library card has access to the print edition of A Changing World, and can see Verner Reed’s photographs in print.
By comparison, Digital Commonwealth’s mission is to enhance access to cultural heritage materials held by Massachusetts libraries, museums, historical societies, and archives, a bigger piece of the pie. “Access to knowledge and information is core to the purpose and structure of the Digital Commonwealth.” Along with 1850 collections from 235 institutions, Digital Commonwealth provides online access to 89 images in Historic New England’s Verner Reed Photographic Collection, 1950-1972.
Barbara Schneider, Member, Digital Commonwealth Outreach Committee
Retired Head Law Librarian, Massachusetts Trial Court Law Libraries
*John R. Stomberg, Essay in A Changing World: New England in the Photographs of Verner Reed 1950-1972, Historic New England, 2004. p. 8.
**Henri Cartier-Bresson, The mind’s eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers, Aperture, 1999. p. 42.
***John Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye, Museum of Modern Art, 1966. p. 10.
Pakachoag: Where the River Bends documents the history of Pakachoag Hill in current day Worcester
By Maureen Mann
Maureen Mann is a Digital Commonwealth Board Member, Digital Humanities Librarian and Civics Education Consultant
Until legislators and school districts officially decide whether Massachusetts students will recognize Indigenous People’s Day, Columbus Day, or both, educators choosing either cultural celebration do so at the risk of community push-back.
Studying the land, however, offers a peaceful curriculum alternative, not to mention a solid fit with Massachusetts social studies standards and the “Changing Landscapes” theme from the Educating for American Democracy Roadmap, a federally funded guide to civics inquiry released in 2021.
Digital Commonwealth explored land histories in a recent virtual event “From Land Acknowledgement to Land Partnership: the making of Pakachoag: Where the River Bends.”
The College of the Holy Cross funded a partnership of land researchers, media educators, and students to create a 45 minute documentary which tells the story of the land beneath their campus. The film is clear, well-researched, and suitable for young audiences.
It “makes a meaningful resource for our community,” says Professor Sarah Luria, film director and English and Environmental studies professor at Holy Cross. “The fact is every community has the potential to tell a story that is land-centered.” Professor Luria believes connecting with “trustworthy” experts in the community is an important first step to telling successful land histories.
Two of her trustworthy partners were Director of the Greater Worcester Land Trust, Colin Novick and Thomas Doughton of Nipmuc heritage and Senior Lecturer at Holy Cross Center for Interdisciplinary Studies. Both appear in the film walking historical sites side by side while sharing their specialized research which blends beautifully into a fuller history of Pakachoag Village and people of Nipmuc heritage living in central Massachusetts.
“One of the ideas we are working with as we went through this whole project is the notion of erasure . . . which is this notion that magically all of the folks who previously lived here, disappeared one day,” says Novick, “in many cases part of that erasure is building over landscapes that actually are historically or culturally significant.”
As a result of the 2020 film, the Greater Worcester Land Trust and the Quinsigamond Band of Nipmuc, an organization including those of Nipmuc heritage and supporters, partnered in application for a conservation partnership grant from the State of Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs Division of Conservation Services to save one of the last parcels of Pakachoag Hill, the source of drinking water for the native community known as Pakachoag Spring.
Educators might not be in a place to guide students to create a film or a new legal land agreement, but there are several digital resources to help educators connect students to their place in the world.
MASSACHUSETTS LAND TRUST COALITION The Massachusetts Land Trust Coalition website provides a map of all land trusts in the state. This resource gathers experts, runs virtual programs and sends a monthly newsletter with the latest on land conservation and preservation.
THE COMMUNITY PRESERVATION ACT The Community Preservation Act (CPA) is a state program designed to help encourage open space, historical preservation, affordable housing, and outdoor recreation. Cities and towns “adopt” the program through town meeting approval which translates into a ballot question at the next town election. Their GIS map shows which towns have adopted this smart growth program passed in 2000. Students will be curious to learn where their town stands in the adoption process.
NATIVE LAND DIGITAL This Application Programming Interface (API) project created by Victor Temprano documents original native homelands of tribal communities around the world. The resource provides an opportunity for Humanities and Technology educators to partner in explaining API code and data contribution.
As more resources present themselves over time, land histories will improve. Colin Novick made a direct plea to the event’s audience of cultural archivists.
“There is a lot of really great material that is currently hidden to the rest of the world which is in the private collections of individual towns. . . . The documents that you have, the books that you have that aren’t digitized usually have wonderful resources that [will provide] the rest of us a great expanded consciousness if we could eventually get that stuff shared out there.”
The Digital Commonwealth no-cost digitization program provides important support to bring those resources to the greater community. The Boston Public Library is the worksite for digitization and the process begins with a simple Digitization Request Form.
“There are no size limitations,” says Jake Sadow, Statewide Digitization Project Archivist, when it comes to map digitization capabilities, “they should be unrolled and flattened for a few weeks before they come. We can handle pretty much anything.”
Curriculum coordinators can advocate for partnerships for land histories within their community by encouraging local historical societies and libraries to digitize materials, perhaps even offering a civics credit for students helping to ready materials for digitization.
