In the 1950s, Tennessee Governor Buford Ellington gave the small town of Shelbyville a nickname that stuck: “Pencil City, U.S.A.”
At the time, six major pencil manufacturers operated inside a town of fewer than 10,000 people. Tennessee’s red cedar was perfect for pencil making, and Shelbyville was the heart of the American pencil industry.
Today, only one of those six remains.
And it’s still going.
A Family Business Since 1923
The Musgrave Pencil Company has been making pencils in Shelbyville since 1923 — over 100 years.
The company actually started even earlier, in 1916, as a lumber operation supplying cedar slats to pencil manufacturers in Germany. After World War I, the Musgrave family traded a load of slats for pencil-making machinery and decided to start making the pencils themselves.
More than a century later, they’re still at it.
Musgrave is now one of only three pencil manufacturers left in the entire United States.
85 Workers, 80 Million Pencils a Year
The Shelbyville factory employs 85 full-time workers and produces between 80 and 90 million pencils every year.
Compare that to the 3.3 billion imported pencils flooding into the U.S. annually from India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, China, Mexico, and Brazil.
The math looks brutal. But Musgrave President Scott Johnson says the company has carved out something the importers struggle to compete with: customization.
“We are the world’s smallest billboard,” Johnson likes to say.
Musgrave specializes in custom-printed pencils — the kind you see in hotels, museums, lumber yards, and yes, the White House gift shop. Their pencils sit in the Tennessee governor’s office. They’re sold to cruise lines, construction companies, and specialty retailers across the country.
How a Pencil Is Made in America
The process starts with wood slats — primarily basswood and poplar, with some incense cedar mixed in.
Each slat is run through a molding machine that cuts precision grooves to hold the graphite core. (And yes — despite the term “lead pencil,” there has never actually been lead in pencils. It’s graphite mixed with clay.)
The two grooved slats are glued together with the graphite sandwiched in between, then shaped into the final pencil — round, hexagonal, carpenter-flat, or bridge.
Then comes painting, custom printing, ferrule attachment for the eraser, quality control, and packaging.
Every Musgrave pencil also goes through rigorous toxicological testing by the Pencil Makers of America to ensure the product is safe for kids and adults alike.
The Carpenter Pencil, the No. 2, and a Songwriter’s Tool
Musgrave’s biggest seller is the carpenter pencil — the flat, wide pencil you see in toolbelts on construction sites across the country. Johnson says Musgrave is by far the leading manufacturer of carpenter pencils in America.
They also make the classic yellow No. 2 hexagon pencil — the one most of us remember from school days and SAT tests.
And they make some unexpected things too: songwriter pencils with a softer core for marking sheet music, golf pencils (some with erasers, for the honest scorekeepers), artist pencils, and colored highlighters.
The America 250 Pencil
As America approaches its 250th anniversary, Musgrave was named the only pencil manufacturer with a licensed America 250 designation.
It’s a fitting honor — a 100-year-old American manufacturer celebrating 250 years of America.
“We are celebrating America 250, and that’s a win for us,” Johnson said.
Why This Matters
Most Americans probably never think about where their pencils come from.
And that’s exactly the problem.
For decades, products like pencils quietly moved overseas. Whole industries that once employed entire American towns disappeared one factory at a time.
Shelbyville lost five of its six pencil manufacturers. But one stayed. One adapted. One found a niche the importers couldn’t easily copy. And one is still employing 85 people and producing tens of millions of American-made pencils every year.
That story is repeated in towns all across America — companies hanging on, finding their lane, refusing to disappear.
And every time someone chooses an American-made pencil instead of an imported one, that company gets to stay open one more day.
Whenever possible, choose Made in USA.
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