DeSoto Magazine August 2021

Making their mark

Pencils may seem simple, but making them is not, especially if you make good ones. The process starts with choosing a type of wood. Company founder James Raford Musgrave backed into the business by being a supplier of slats cut from Tennessee cedar trees. His customers were pencil makers in Europe.

World War I put a wrinkle in that business plan, and Musgrave decided to handle the whole process in Shelbyville. He bartered cedar slats for European pencil machinery, found a German immigrant mechanic in St. Louis, and started hiring locals. Today, his staff is comprised of nearly 100 people.

Touring Musgrave Pencil factory is a trip back in time. In fact, the company founder would feel quite at home. It’s noisy, nonstop, high-speed, and surprisingly labor intensive, despite the array of complicated machinery that might appear to be Rube Goldberg contraptions but actually are precision instruments.

“We have machines that have been here since the late 1930s,” Hulan says. “(In the early decades) all the machines used to run off a line shaft powered by a steam generator that burned our own sawdust. Imagine all the belts and pulleys back then.

We were largely self-sufficient from the start.”

Getting to the point

Watching thin slats of wood morph into finished pencils is intriguing. It’s an exercise in sandwich making, capped off with multiple coats of paint and some notso-gentle squeezing.

The process starts with a slim rectangular piece of wood with channels cut into it. Graphite cores slide into the channels, glue is applied, and a mirror-image piece of wood is placed on top. That “sandwich” gets locked into forms so the glue will set.

Later, the sandwich gets fed into a cutting machine that spits out raw pencils at a prodigious pace. The pencils could be round, hexagonal, or rectangular. The rectangular ones are carpenters’ pencils, useful to carpenters because they won’t roll away and are exceptionally good for advertising and promotional purposes.

Many steps remain. If you think a Musgrave pencils gets a single paint baptism, you’d be wrong by a factor of at least six. Imprinting a logo or a special message comes next, and finally comes tipping. That’s when a machine grabs each 64 DeSoto