The " A Pencil Is More Than A Piece Of Wood With Lead In It!" Story
It was an ordinary day. Reading an article in one of my latest Smithsonian magazines titled "The Write Stuff." Any guess what the story might be about? Well....if you guessed pencils, you are a good guesser! First sentence in the story began with...Wood passes through the loud whine of saws spinning at 8,000 revolutions per minute. Pencils clack-clack-clack as they shoot through a paint box and assume their various hues, Next is the din of ratcheting as aluminum ferrules and erasers are punched onto ends. Now and then a blast of air clears the machinery's crevices so the conveyor belts remain in constant, fluid motion. But near the end of the assembly line, in a nook where pencils are imprinted with their logos, the sound is no more than the soft clink of the perfect little sticks falling into a heap. A worker plucks one from the bin and looks at the name freshly stamped in silvery foil. The stamping is the world's smallest billboard! The location is the Musgrave Pencil Company in Shelbyville, Tennessee, about 60 miles south of Nashville, where the municipal seal bears the words "The Pencil City." I've often wondered how and where that yellow stick with the lead appearing from the one end was made. It all began when a fellow named James Raford Musgrave founded a pencil-wood mill in Shelbyville in 1916. They were made at that location since there was an abundance of virgin eastern red cedar, the slow-growing, premier pencil stock that is used in the pencil industry. Musgrave has been manufacturing pencils since 1923, launching what's thought to be the first pencil manufacturer in the South. Wasn't long before other manufacturers arrived in town! Today Musgrave stands on the same spot where it all began, inside a two-story warehouse, unadorned but for a 25-foot-long No. 2 pencil painted on the outside where nearly 100 employees produce around 72 million pencils a year. Today there are less expensive imports with the U.S. now importing 3.7 billion pencils from China, Brazil and elsewhere. This isn't the first upheaval in the long history of the pencil industry. The first came in 1564, after a high-quality deposit of graphite was found in England and quickly supplanted the graphite used in earlier writing instruments. Pencil making began in the U.S. around 1812. The late 19th century brought the yellow pencil and the built-in eraser. By 1937 Shelbyville was producing 10% of our nation's pencils or roughly 100 million a year. The industry reached it highest point in the mid-20th century. Musgrave has managed to escape history's jaws, if not its grip. Most of the materials it once sourced locally or domestically now come from China. One thing it has done..... taking advantage of the seemingly paradoxical forces of digital marketing and traditional artisan goods, is selling branded ways directly to the public, in addition to its longstanding business done mostly through wholesalers and distributors. Musgrave's branded pencil designs, from the No. 2 to thicker carpenter pencils, to the rotund Choo-Choo has been gaining a reputation for quality and unstuffy craftsmanship among a new audience. The Musgrave pencils appeal to "people who are serious pencil-users" but aren't really snobs about it, since their stuff is affordable, it's beautiful and it ticks all the boxes! In 2019 Musgave started selling its Tennessee Red, a naturally fragrant, marbled throwback to the early U.S. pencil industry and the hallowed wood that put Shelbyville on the map. "It is the most American pencil that one could possibly buy." And those who do buy a box will find, when their package arrives, another timeless, uncommonly earnest artifact: a handwritten thank-you note, in pencil or pen! Can't top that folks. It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.
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