Musgrave Tennessee Red: A Pencil Made from the Wood That Started the Company

Musgrave Pencil Company began with wood before it began with pencils.

James Raford Musgrave founded the company in Shelbyville, Tennessee, in 1916. Middle Tennessee had an abundant supply of Eastern red cedar, a fragrant, fine-grained wood that had already proved useful for pencil making. Musgrave cut the cedar into slats and shipped them to pencil manufacturers in Europe.

Only later did the company become a pencil maker itself.

On trips to Europe, Musgrave traded some of those slats for pencil-making machinery. With help from a German mechanic he hired in St. Louis, he set up production in Shelbyville. By 1919, the business had moved from supplying pencil wood to manufacturing complete pencils.

That early wood was Eastern red cedar, Juniperus virginiana.

For anyone familiar with modern pencils, that detail is important. Today, many high-quality wood-cased pencils use California incense cedar because it machines cleanly, sharpens well, and is available in commercially useful quantities. Eastern red cedar was once a major American pencil wood, but it gradually became less practical as suitable supplies declined.

Musgrave itself shifted away from it.

By the 1920s, the company was already using California incense cedar as Tennessee sources of pencil-grade red cedar became harder to obtain. Decades later, Musgrave says it phased out Eastern red cedar pencils in favor of incense cedar during the 1960s and 1970s.

The Tennessee Red brings the older wood back.

That is what makes the pencil interesting.

The Tennessee Red is not simply a modern No. 2 with a regional name. Musgrave created it after obtaining pencil-ready slats of Eastern red cedar. The finished pencil leaves that wood almost completely visible.

There is no opaque yellow lacquer hiding the grain.

Instead, a matte clear coat shows the natural color variation of the cedar. Some pencils are lighter. Some are darker. Grain patterns vary from barrel to barrel. A red foil imprint provides the main visual contrast.

The three-star emblem on the pencil comes from the Tennessee state flag.

Everything about the design points back to place.

The wood.

The name.

The emblem.

The manufacturer.

The factory is still in Shelbyville.

This makes Tennessee Red unusual in a market where many pencils use branding that could belong almost anywhere.

Its regional identity is part of the material itself.

The strongest sensory feature is not visual.

It is smell.

Eastern red cedar is highly aromatic. Sharpening a Tennessee Red exposes fresh wood and releases the familiar dry, resinous cedar scent associated with cedar chests, closets, and old wooden objects.

That aroma is far stronger than what most modern incense-cedar pencils produce.

For collectors who usually compare graphite darkness, point retention, lacquer, or ferrules, the Tennessee Red adds another variable: the wood announces itself immediately.

The pencil uses a No. 2 core.

Musgrave positions it as an everyday writing grade, balanced between softness and point retention. The graphite is not the experimental part of the pencil. The wood is.

That distinction matters.

If the company had installed an exotic extra-soft core, unusual ferrule, or oversized barrel, the model could have become a collection of novelties. Instead, Musgrave kept the writing system conventional and allowed the red cedar to define the product.

The barrel is hexagonal.

The core is No. 2.

The pencil is supplied unsharpened.

The clear finish exposes the wood rather than covering it.

That simplicity makes comparison easier.

Put a Tennessee Red beside an ordinary incense-cedar No. 2 and sharpen both.

The differences in wood become visible immediately.

Eastern red cedar is not as dimensionally predictable as the material modern pencil factories usually prefer.

Musgrave is unusually open about this.

The company warns buyers that Tennessee Red cores can be slightly off-center. The wood can show modest surface wear. Some pencils can have slight bowing because Eastern red cedar may warp as it dries.

Those are normally defects a premium pencil manufacturer would try to hide.

Here they are almost part of the point.

Modern pencil production rewards uniformity.

Slats should be straight.

Grooves should align perfectly.

Cores should sit in the center.

Finished barrels should look interchangeable.

Eastern red cedar makes some of that harder.

Musgrave explains that perfectly centered cores depend on highly symmetrical slats. The natural variation of the red cedar can make that precision more difficult than with the incense cedar used in standard production.

The Tennessee Red therefore exposes a trade-off between material character and industrial uniformity.

That is a much more interesting story than simply calling the wood “premium.”

The cedar is desirable precisely because it is distinctive.

It is also less cooperative.

Musgrave even recommends electric sharpening for the Tennessee Red rather than assuming every handheld sharpener will give the best result.

That tells us something about how specialized the wood is in a modern production environment.

The pencil factory was optimized over decades around predictable materials.

Reintroducing an older wood means rediscovering some of its complications.

The history loops back on itself.

In 1916, Musgrave had Tennessee red cedar and needed to learn how to make pencils.

A century later, Musgrave already knew how to make pencils but had to adapt again to Tennessee red cedar.

That reversal gives the model much more historical weight than a simple heritage reissue.

It is not a replica of a specific 1919 pencil.

It is a modern pencil built from the material that made the original company possible.

The Musgrave story is also tied closely to Shelbyville.

By the late 1920s, the company had helped establish a local pencil-manufacturing ecosystem. Pencil production and specialty advertising became significant industries in the area.

In the late 1950s, Tennessee governor Buford Ellington recognized Shelbyville as “The Pencil City.”

That nickname is not just marketing invented for a modern gift box.

It reflects a period when pencil manufacturing became an important part of the town’s industrial identity.

A Tennessee Red therefore connects three levels of history.

The individual object.

The company.

The town.

That makes it unusually suitable for a collection organized around manufacturing geography.

A Castell 9000 can represent Stein and the German pencil tradition.

A Hi-Uni can represent Japanese postwar manufacturing precision.

A Grafwood can represent Swiss graphite design.

A Bruynzeel can represent Dutch postwar pencil production.

The Tennessee Red represents a much more regional American story: cedar, Shelbyville, and a factory that began by exporting slats.

Packaging strengthens that connection.

The standard twelve-pack uses a red paper box.

Musgrave also sells a twenty-four-pencil version in a cedar box.

For a collector, the cedar box is more than decorative packaging. It reinforces the material story and turns the set into a compact display of the model’s identity.

An individual Tennessee Red shows the wood.

A full box explains why the wood matters.

That is a useful distinction when deciding what to preserve.

If I were cataloging the model, I would record more than the imprint and grade.

I would photograph the grain on several pencils from the same box.

I would note core centering.

I would record visible color differences.

I would keep examples with unusually dark and unusually pale cedar.

I would also preserve one pencil unsharpened and use another.

This is one of those models where use reveals information.

Sharpening exposes fresh wood.

The scent becomes obvious.

The grain around the core becomes visible.

Any centering variation becomes measurable.

A pristine pencil preserves factory condition, but a sharpened example explains the material.

The two-pencil approach makes particular sense here.

The Tennessee Red also changes how we think about “consistency.”

For a graphite core, consistency is usually desirable. A No. 2 should behave like the next No. 2.

For wood, complete visual consistency can erase what makes the material interesting.

The Tennessee Red invites variation.

One barrel may contain a dramatic dark streak.

Another may be nearly uniform.

One may show two noticeably different cedar halves joined around the core.

The factory is still making the same product, but the wood refuses to become visually identical.

Collectors usually treat variation as something to classify.

With Tennessee Red, variation is built into the experience.

That makes the model useful for teaching another lesson about pencils.

Wood is not just a casing.

It is a natural engineering material.

Its grain direction affects machining.

Its density affects sharpening.

Its moisture history affects dimensional stability.

Its extractives affect aroma.

Its color affects appearance.

Its availability can reshape an entire industry.

The American pencil industry did not move toward incense cedar because Eastern red cedar suddenly became bad wood.

It moved because manufacturing at scale requires material that can be sourced and processed reliably.

Tennessee Red deliberately steps away from some of that industrial convenience.

The result is a pencil that looks less uniform but tells a clearer material story.

That is why I would not compare it to a Ticonderoga or a Blackwing only by writing feel.

Its graphite is only half the object.

Sharpen it.

Look at the grain.

Smell the exposed cedar.

Check how the two slats meet around the core.

Then place it beside a conventional incense-cedar pencil.

The comparison becomes about the body of the pencil rather than only the mark on the page.

Musgrave began by turning Tennessee red cedar into slats for other companies.

More than a century later, it is using that wood to make a pencil carrying its own name, in the same Tennessee town where the company began.

Few pencils connect material, factory, and place so neatly.

The Tennessee Red is not valuable because it reinvents the No. 2 pencil.

It is valuable because it makes the wood impossible to ignore.