See Inside One of America’s Last Pencil Factories

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. Scott Johnson plucks one from a bin and looks at the name freshly stamped in silvery foil. And so it steadily goes at Musgrave Pencil Company, one of the few pencil manufacturers left in the United States—there are perhaps four, whereas there used to be some two dozen—and certainly the last in Shelbyville, Tennessee, about 60 miles south of Nashville, where the municipal seal bears the words “The Pencil City.”