James Raford Musgrave founded the Musgrave Pencil Company in 1916 in the US, it is now one of the last remaining pencil companies in the country. James Raford knew that Middle Tennessee had an abundant supply of Tennessee red cedar, a wood that had proven perfect for a pencil. Source: Timberbiz, Musgrave Pencil Company
He cut the Tennessee red cedar into slats and started selling the wood to German pencil makers and sold these Europe by way of ships leaving the New Orleans port. The pencil slats were tied in bundles and then wrapped and stored in burlap bags for shipping.
When the impact of World War I interfered with the exchange of goods with Europe, Colonel Musgrave turned to American pencil manufacturers to market his slats. In 1919 the Pencil Makers Association organized to represent and unify the industry. This action promoted an exchange of raw material and technology within the domestic market, and it was during this time that Musgrave turned his attention to production.
For production he needed the correct machinery for each step of manufacturing — mainly grooving, shaping, painting, and tipping (putting the ferrule and eraser on the end of the pencil). So, on one of his slat-selling trips to Europe, he bartered pencil slats for pencil machinery. He returned this machinery to Shelbyville and set up shop.
The pivot to production from milling in 1919 was timely because toward the mid-1920s, Tennessee sources of red cedar logs and rail fences slowly started to dwindle. It was then the California incense cedar — a fast-growing, plentiful wood with similar characteristics to the Tennessee variety — replaced it.
This wood was shipped to us from California in rail cars and the lumber was about 20 to 25 feet long, 18 to 24 inches wide, and three inches thick. It was stacked crisscrossed so it could air-dry, a process that took about a month or so.
By the time of the Great Depression in 1929, the Shelbyville company not only made its own pencils, but Colonel Musgrave had the vision and investment in the manufacturing industry to support and nurture the establishment of other local pencil manufacturers as well as the specialty advertising imprinting industry.
During World War II, many women went to work in the pencil factory. Governor Buford Ellington named Shelbyville “The Pencil City” in the late 1950s.
In the late ’50s or early ’60s, lumber prices spiked due to increased demand, largely from furniture manufacturers and so the company concentrated on the pencil manufacturing process starting with the pencil slat instead of the log.
In the ’90s, the company began to see imported pencils flooding the market. This drove most pencil manufacturing overseas. It was then that most pencil factories closed.
This manufacturing shift also meant that there were no remaining mills making pencil slats in the United States, although some factories were slowly opening back up that could produce small-volume orders.
Musgrave Pencil Company can continue to grow as an American manufacturer, but the US has to slow the imports coming in at very low tariff rates. You can walk into any big box store and see that most pencils are now made in China.
