Long-ago Arkansas was a pencil-producing state — not a big manufacturer, but there used to be pencil mills in them there hills. By 1922, though, the industry was down to a nub.
Baxter County publisher Hubert Dee Routzong (1861-1932) wrote about that in a vivid feature that appeared in the Arkansas Democrat on Aug. 20, 1922.
Routzong wrote, "Where a few years ago were several cedar sawmills in the state, there is today but one, the Wallace mill at Cotter, owned by the Wallace Pencil Company of St. Louis and operated under the management of F.C. Wiseman."
Did the eloquent Routzong freelance the story for the Democrat? Or did the Democrat editors hire him to write it; or did they swipe it from his Cotter Record newspaper? I don't know, but memo: Thou shalt not steal.
Brief mentions in the Arkansas Gazette and Baxter Bulletin suggest Routzong was his own reporter, editor, business manager, compositor and pressman, and unusual in that he didn't write out stories before typesetting them. "He sets the paper out of his head. He has few mistakes in his proof," according to the Bulletin.
Also, when he wanted to go fishing, he handed his office keys and cash box to a subscriber and just went.
His pencil mill story explains that the Wallace Co. depended upon the red cedar growing abundantly upon all the hills in the Ozarks, in all the gulches, "in the almost inaccessible gorges and even clinging to the bare face of the towering cliffs of the White River."
On stony outcrops "the sturdy red cedar, dwarfed, gnarled and twisted, withstands the onslaught of the elements, its roots forcing their way into every crack and crevasse, providing a safe nesting place for the owls, hawks and an occasional eagle." But in the gulches below where soil accumulated, the trees grew straight as an arrow, 75 to 100 feet tall, "tapering from butt to tip with a sound heart as red as blood and as fragrant as a tuberose ..."
Red cedar heartwood made excellent pencils, cedar chests, souvenirs and even imitation minnows used for bait. "It is the only wood that is light, withstands moisture, will not waterlog, shrink or swell," he wrote.
Routzong noted that the Eagle Pencil Co., American Pencil Co., and Standard Pencil Co. all once operated mills in Arkansas. After felling the most easily accessed timber on more than 10,000 acres, the American company shifted its operation to the West Coast, where it milled California redwood, fir and incense cedar. With them gone, the Wallace firm only had to compete with mills making cedar posts for railroad stations. Unfortunately, red cedar grows slowly, and post makers took every tree big enough to be a post -- even a cheap 2-incher, mostly sapwood and thus inclined to rot or warp.
Some of the "men and girls" at the factory made good money, Routzong wrote, because they were skilled in operations requiring exacting and delicate measurement, "as a careful examination of your lead pencil will make clear."
The Cotter mill employed 10 to 25 such hands, but Wallace paid many more people for trees they cut and rafted downstream to rail cars. One carload of rough timber cost the mill $250.
From the train, wagons bearing logs suitable for pencil stock were hauled to Cotter 40 miles or more over the steep hills. One wagon might carry 50 cubic feet or more, fetching 35 cents per cubic foot. But 60% to 75% was unusable, being hollow, wormy or knotty. Typically, the mill bought six train carloads of rough wood to create one carload of milled pencil slats.
Factoring in labor and other costs, on average, it took $4,000 to make one carload of pencil slats — more than $70,500 buying power in today's dollars (see arkansasonline.com/822cash).
Only the best red cedar could be used, and it was becoming rare.
"That pencil on your desk that looks as though made of red cedar may not be red cedar after all," Routzong wrote. Among the substitutes milled in California, incense cedar was almost clear white. Although much coarser grained than red cedar, it was light and soft. Manufacturers stained incense cedar pencil slats to make them red.
Stained incense cedar looked like real red cedar, but there was a great difference: "Red cedar neither shrinks nor swells, holds glue, retains a polish and is easily sharpened without waste." Incense cedar didn't do all that.
"If the wood swells or shrinks the pencil comes apart where glued and the lead becomes loose and drops out, sometimes in small pieces and sometimes the whole lead will come out," he wrote. "This cannot happen with red cedar."
First, the workers squared off the round logs and shaved away the sap wood, leaving bare sticks. The larger the log, the less sap wood had to be removed. Wormholes, big knots and knurls were discarded.
Mill workers used metric dimensions, which Routzong translated to inches: Sticks were sliced 1 to 3 inches thick and then cut into blocks about 7 inches long. A different saw then sliced the blocks into slats of varied widths, from slightly more than two pencils laid side by side to three, four, five, six or seven pencils wide.
The mill bundled its milled slats off to St. Louis or other places to be finished.
At a finishing plant, each slat went through a groover — a machine that cut a groove to hold the lead.
Pencil lead is not lead. Mostly it's graphite. In 1922, it arrived at the finishing plant as bagged powder. Factory hands mixed it with powdered kaolin and water in an American process — developed by the writer Henry David Thoreau — to make a paste. An extruder exerting a pressure of more than 20 tons to the inch squished this paste into long strings.
While still wet, the strings were coiled around a large disk so they didn't touch and left to dry a bit. While still pliable, they were cut in sections four times longer than a pencil, straightened out and piled upon a metal tray. When full, the tray went into a furnace to be heated to bright red — which potters know as 1292 degrees F, or 700 degrees C. The longer the lead cooked the harder it became.
American-style pencil lead is a ceramic material, y'all.
Before cooling to room temperature, the leads took a dip in Japan wax. Then they were slipped into the groove of one pencil slat and topped by glue and another grooved slat. A powerful hydraulic press clamped those glued slats together until dry.
Then came a planer that divided each slat into individual pencils, shaping them in the process. And then came stain, varnish, the cutting of tips, branding, banding and packing for shipment.
Wiseman told Routzong that he could see a few more years' worth of cedar from his factory; and he knew of fine cedar brakes in the hills of Marion, Searcy, Stone and Izard counties as well as southern Missouri.
"A few years ago there were many vast red cedar brakes in north Arkansas, but they contain little timber of value today," Routzong wrote, adding, "a cedar brake is nothing but a thicket of cedar. It frequently covers much ground and grows so thick that there is no underbrush, grass or weeds — nothing but cedar. Sometimes it is so thick that in a heavy snowfall not a flake will reach the ground. While the tops and limbs of the small trees are bending with their load of snow, the ground underneath is bare."
In 1922, Routzong wrote that woodland creatures knew this about red cedar. I reckon they still do.
Print Headline: Cedar trees a pencil maker’s dream
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