Southern Gentleman Southern Nights Under The Stars

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

pencil to crimp down one end to add a metal ferrule. A whirling bin of erasers pops one into the open end of the ferrule, and a final squeeze locks the eraser in place. Tennessee red cedar isn’t as abundant as it used to be, and most of Musgrave’s pencils now are basswood or incense cedar. Ironically, much of that wood comes from American trees shipped to China and returned as pencil slats, the opposite of what James Raford Musgrave did a century ago.

Drawing on variety Musgrave Pencil’s customers today are a diverse lot. The school market is big. Even a computer screen-addicted elementary school student enjoys being rewarded with a pencil that says, “I’m a Superstar,” “Student of the Month,” or “I Try My Best.” Perhaps even better are ones decorated with dinosaurs, turtles, or lizards. One truly serious product is a school pencil with a graphite core designed specially to be used on standardized tests. Beyond that, companies want promotional pencils, family celebrations want special mementos, artists want pencils with discrete gradations of graphite cores, and some people simply want a top-quality, distinctive, American-made writing instrument. That explains Musgrave Pencil’s Heritage Collection, its own branded products, some with great backstories. For instance, Single Barrel 106 pencils are special because they are made from wood that never made it into the company founder’s last shipment to Europe. When that wood is gone, it’s really gone. Another example is Tennessee Red. Musgrave Pencil still can find Tennessee red cedar trees for limited production of pencils that honor the roots of Pencil City. Buyers can purchase Tennessee Reds, Single Barrel 106s, and Heritage Collection pencils through Musgrave Pencil’s website and at some stationery stores. Some are even packaged in sweet-smelling cedar boxes ready for gift giving.

musgravepencil.com

Tom Adkinson especially appreciates the erasers on his Tennessee Reds when he works crossword puzzles. He is a Marco Polo member of SATW (Society of American Travel Writers) and is author of “100 Things to Do in Nashville Before You Die.”