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American
Roots
The sweet aroma of cedar
fills the Sanford pencil factory in
Lewisburg, Tenn. (pop. 10,698), as
a machine etches tiny grooves in
pamphlet-size cedar slats. Slivers
of a graphite-and-clay mixture are
inserted into each furrowed slat, glue
is applied, and a second slice of wood
is placed on top, forming a pencil
sandwich. Farther down the assem
bly line, a shaping machine cuts and
spits out the raw pencils and sends
them shimmying up a conveyor to
be bathed in golden-yellow paint.
“If it’s not yellow, you don’t think of it as a No. 2 pencil," says Danny
Bonn, the plant's operational excellence manager. What's more, if you've
got one of these ever-popular writing instruments on your desk, there's
a good chance it was made by Sanford. As the largest pencil manufac-
A
Talk to your doctor now. "
Or to learn more,
visit veramyst.com
or call 866-9-VERAMYST
GlaxoSmithKline
02007 The GiaxoSmrthKltne Group of Companies
A* rights reserved. Printed m USA. VRMOO4RO July 2007
Have you asked
your doctor about
Veramyst
(fluticasone furoate)
Nasal Spray?
* mvm
Mm .
turer in the United States, Sanford Brands accounts for more than half of the
nation’s pencil production.
Despite the automated assembly line, pencil-making remains much the
same as it did when William Monroe, a cabinetmaker in Concord, Mass.,
assembled the first American pencils during the War of 1812. Pencils previ
ously were shipped in from Europe, but the war cut off all imports. In 1857,
two Massachusetts businessmen, Frederick Redington and William Sanford
Jr., launched the Sanford Manufacturing Co., which moved to Chicago nine
years later.
By the early 1900 s, an abundance of red cedar forests had transformed a
five-county farming region in middle Tennessee into a hot spot for pencil
making. Sanford opened two plants there, one in Lewisburg and a smaller
one in nearby Shelbyville (pop. 16,105), to take advantage of the aromatic,
splinter-resistant wood. So many other manufacturers did the same thing
that by 1920 they had exhausted the supply of native red cedar. Sanford and
its competitors turned to the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, where
they found incense cedar, a plentiful timber soft enough to ply into pencils
via mass production.
The company went global in the mid-19905, but the 400,000-square-foot
Lewisburg site has run continuously since 1939, today churning out 1,000 dis-
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ferent products, including
mechanical pencils and
high-end art pencils in
132 shades.
The No. 2—so named
for its degree of hardness—
is still No. 1. Each day,
Sanford pencil-makers pro
duce more than 4 million
of tlie bright-yellow main
stays. Pencils continue to
hold their own, even in an
age of text-messaging and
e-mail, says Ricky Russell,
production and inventory
control supervisor at the
Lewisburg plant.