About this item
Eastern Red Cedar, officially called Juniperus Virginiana, is 'soft, red, fine-grained, fragrant, and decay-resistant, often used for fence posts.'
And as Musgrave fans already know, it was what our founder James Raford Musgrave originally used in our pencils. As our company history shares, Colonel Musgrave would swap old, dried-out fence boards from farmers for metal fencing, using the perfectly dried wood as pencil slats.
But fast-forward to the '60s and '70s — we phased out cedar pencils made from Eastern Red Cedar and replaced it with the more abundant and easier to use California Incense Cedar. And while today Musgrave is able to work with a handful of different varieties of wood from all over the world, we had never worked with the original Eastern Red Cedar until now!
Other details that make this pencil a little different than your off-the-shelf pencil is that we find this pencil sharpens better in an electric sharpener instead of hand sharpening. Finally, some pencils have an ever-so-slight arch, barely noticeable to an untrained eye, because this kind of cedar has a slight warp when dried. While most buyers won’t catch these kinds of nuances, we want to note these little details for the pencil aficionados who may take notice.
The name was more of a no-brainer, as we’d internally called the pencil prototype 'The Tennessee Red Cedar Pencil' for months. By the time we came to the design phase, the name 'Tennessee Red™' just came to us. It is worth noting that we did not give this pencil a customer-facing number. Just like the greats who go by first name only, we believe this one and only pencil needed no number to be differentiated from its pencil contemporaries. And while it’s not technically a mononym (á la Beyoncé, Madonna, or Prince), perhaps we could dare call this hardworking American classic 'The Boss' of pencils.
And as Musgrave fans already know, it was what our founder James Raford Musgrave originally used in our pencils. As our company history shares, Colonel Musgrave would swap old, dried-out fence boards from farmers for metal fencing, using the perfectly dried wood as pencil slats.
But fast-forward to the '60s and '70s — we phased out cedar pencils made from Eastern Red Cedar and replaced it with the more abundant and easier to use California Incense Cedar. And while today Musgrave is able to work with a handful of different varieties of wood from all over the world, we had never worked with the original Eastern Red Cedar until now!
Other details that make this pencil a little different than your off-the-shelf pencil is that we find this pencil sharpens better in an electric sharpener instead of hand sharpening. Finally, some pencils have an ever-so-slight arch, barely noticeable to an untrained eye, because this kind of cedar has a slight warp when dried. While most buyers won’t catch these kinds of nuances, we want to note these little details for the pencil aficionados who may take notice.
The name was more of a no-brainer, as we’d internally called the pencil prototype 'The Tennessee Red Cedar Pencil' for months. By the time we came to the design phase, the name 'Tennessee Red™' just came to us. It is worth noting that we did not give this pencil a customer-facing number. Just like the greats who go by first name only, we believe this one and only pencil needed no number to be differentiated from its pencil contemporaries. And while it’s not technically a mononym (á la Beyoncé, Madonna, or Prince), perhaps we could dare call this hardworking American classic 'The Boss' of pencils.
