Musgrave Pencil Company is 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, where the municipal seal bears the words “The Pencil City.” That reputation began with James Raford Musgrave, who founded a pencil-wood mill there in 1916. His and other milling operations were drawn to the area by its abundance of virgin eastern red cedars, the slow-growing premier pencil stock that the industry soon used up. …He began making his own pencils in 1923, launching what’s thought to be the first pencil manufacturer in the South. Today the family-owned business stands on the same spot where it began. Inside a two-story warehouse, unadorned but for a 25-foot-long No. 2 pencil painted on the outside, nearly 100 employees produce around 72 million pencils a year.