Thoreau’s Pencils

When Henry Thoreau was a boy, he asked his mother, Cynthia, what he should do when he grew up. “You can buckle on your knapsack,” she told him, “and roam abroad to seek your fortune.” It was a familiar route into the world for second sons especially, but for Henry the possibility was too awful to contemplate. As tears filled his eyes, his older sister, Helen, came to his rescue. “No,” she assured him, “you shall not go: You shall stay at home and live with us.” So Henry did, virtually all his life, and paid his way in pencils.

John Thoreau, Henry’s father, had entered the pencil business in 1823, after his brother-in-law happened upon a vein of plumbago, or graphite, in the New Hampshire hills. By then, John and Cynthia had four children, including Henry, and needed a lucky break. As a young man, John had borrowed against his expected inheritance to open a store. But the early death of his father, combined with mismanagement of the family estate, meant that John’s inheritance never came through. His store failed, and afterward he struggled to earn a living beyond his debt by clerking, farming, and ultimately selling his gold wedding ring.

Once John got started in pencils, he and Cynthia were determined to recover the economic security and social standing they had lost. Pencils made by the family firm, initially called J. Thoreau & Co., quickly gained local recognition, winning an award in the first year of production, but financial success still proved elusive.

More than a decade later, John proposed that Henry apprentice himself to a cabinetmaker—sensible training for a future pencil manufacturer. But when Henry passed Harvard’s entrance exam in 1833, Cynthia insisted that he attend, even if sending him to the college would be a financial stretch. In 1835, near the end of Henry’s second year, the Thoreaus gave up their brick house in Concord and moved into a smaller one with two of John’s spinster sisters.

Fifteen miles away in Cambridge, Henry felt their sacrifice keenly. In November 1835, the Board of Overseers of Harvard College voted to allow enrolled students to take up to 13 weeks off to earn money teaching, and Henry was one of the first to apply for leave. A month later, he became the master of a one-room schoolhouse and 70 boys in Canton, about 20 miles to the south. By the time he returned to Cambridge in the spring, he had acquired a new contempt for Harvard’s classical curriculum as well as symptoms of what historians now think was the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him.

In May 1836, increasingly sick, Henry left Harvard again, and this time it wasn’t clear whether he would be going back—whether he had the strength, or his family the money. Late in the summer, just before the start of the fall term, Henry and his father packed up boxes of pencils and set out on a trip to New York, where they hoped to earn money for tuition.

Henry returned to Cambridge that fall with mixed feelings. He finished 19th in his graduating class of 41, good enough to earn him a prize of $25 and a prestigious speaking role in the commencement ceremony. He and two other students were assigned to speak on a theme of special relevance: “The Commercial Spirit of Modern Times, Considered in Its Influence on the Political, Moral, and Literary Character of a Nation.” Many members of his class were struggling to find jobs amid an economic crisis that would come to be known as the Panic of 1837. Thoreau wondered whether they should even be trying. He had a job in the pencil factory waiting for him, but he wanted nothing to do with it.

Imagine looking down at Earth from “an observatory above the stars,” Thoreau asked the hundreds assembled for the graduation ceremony. How would this “beehive of ours” appear from that height? Men “hammering and chipping, baking and brewing … scraping together a little of the gilded dust upon its surface”—precisely what his father did all day while mixing graphite dust into pencil leads. For Henry, these working men had given away the most important thing they possessed: their freedom. The commercial spirit, Thoreau argued, was too much “the ruling spirit.” Its triumph had made every man “a slave of matter.”

After graduation, Henry started a teaching job in Concord, only to quit 10 days into the academic year rather than continue to discipline his students with a ferule, as ordered by the town. He appealed to friends for word of other openings, but none appeared. Out of options, he joined his father in the pencil factory after all.

That autumn, Henry started to dig into the complex technical problems that had made American pencils notoriously “coarse, brittle, greasy, and scratchy,” as Thoreau biographer Laura Dassow Walls describes them, especially compared with European imports. Possibly through research in the Harvard library, Henry developed a formula for kiln-fired pencil leads—a mix of finely ground graphite and clay—that could be reliably graded from hard to soft. The improved Thoreau product appealed especially to engineers, surveyors, carpenters, and artists who valued its consistency.

After this initial success, Henry tried to get away again. In 1838, he returned to teaching and later opened a school with his brother, John. They taught together until John Jr.’s health—he, too, suffered from tuberculosis—worsened. In January 1842, John died of tetanus, and before long, Henry found himself back in his father’s factory. “I have been making pencils all day,” he wrote with resignation in his journal that March.

In 1844, Henry made another breakthrough, inventing a grinding machine that produced exceptionally fine graphite powder—the key to a strong, even point, and in turn a clear, steady line. On the strength of these innovations, Thoreau pencils won more awards in 1847 and 1849, and they were celebrated as the equal of any English ones. No one in the United States made better pencils than the Thoreaus, and the reason for their success was Henry.

His inventions helped to lift his family into Concord’s comfortable middle class. In 1849, the Thoreaus bought a large house on Main Street, and Henry helped attach the pencil factory sheds to the back. Inside, a fine graphite dust coated all the furniture. Around the same time, John Thoreau changed the name of the family business from J. Thoreau & Co. to J. Thoreau & Son.

And yet, for all their technical complexity, the manufacturing solutions that Henry came up with didn’t address the greatest challenge of pencil making—one that scholars of Thoreau’s life and work have long overlooked. Making high-quality pencils in the middle of the 19th century required a special kind of wood from a tree that grew in the southern states, especially in Florida and around the Gulf of Mexico, where it was harvested and prepared by enslaved workers.