National Pencil Day and a Classic American Writer by Susan Van Kirk

Why is it occasional, insignificant details stick in your mind? Even when you can’t remember where you left your car keys, you can always remember these odd little facts. It’s as if the connections in your memory consisted of concrete. One of those tiny details solidly glued to my brain is that Henry David Thoreau—lecturer, land surveyor, writer, philosopher, and activist— had a job on the side: he was a pencil-maker. When I was teaching American Literature, I always thought this was an odd thing for him to do.

 

So, in honor of National Pencil Day, which occurred last Saturday, I decided to investigate this odd little fact once and for all.

 

The research about this detail is, I’d imagine, more extensive now than when I was in the classroom. It appears that Henry’s father, John Thoreau, along with a partner, founded the Thoreau Pencil Company of Concord, Massachusetts. At that time, American pencils were overshadowed in quality and demand by those made in France and England. American graphite was greasy, smeared easily, and the resulting pencils were not highly regarded by the buying public. Canadian graphite, of better quality, was available to John Thoreau, but its cost was prohibitive. Nevertheless, the company did well enough that young Henry accompanied his father to New York City and sold enough pencils to help send Henry to Harvard.

 

While at Harvard, Thoreau researched the French method of making pencils and discovered they used clay as a binder with the graphite. At that time, American pencils were made of wood that was cut in half, filled with graphite, and glued back together. Henry put his mind to work trying to figure out how to make a better pencil, one that would rival their European competitors.

 

He developed a pencil made from a groove in a piece of wood filled with ground graphite and clay. Depending on the composition of the filler, he could make pencil lead harder or softer. He created the 1-4 system of numbers we use today to define the hardness of the pencil lead. By the 1840’s, Thoreau pencils were in high demand. The company was soaring.

 

But Henry didn’t stop there. Next, he designed a machine to grind the graphite finer, and another machine to drill a lengthwise hole through the wood. This was the engineering feat that revolutionized Thoreau pencils. This new product was the best in America and the business grew considerably. Now that it was profitable again, Henry went on to other things, like writing books that would eventually become literary classics and spending a night in jail.

 

He sold a thousand pencils to fund the publication of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.

Another hundred pencils published Walden. Neither sold well in his lifetime, but, of course, we know what happened to sales long after his death.

 

Now that I’ve researched this odd little bit of information, I guess it wasn’t such a tiny detail after all. The fact that we have a National Pencil Day, and we owe much of it to Henry David Thoreau’s ingenuity, is more impressive than I’d imagined. If his day job was stuck in my brain before, it’s now a permanent fixture.