The Musgrave Pencil Company is located in Shelbyville, Tennessee (“Pencil City”), which sits just down the road from my hometown of Franklin. Several years ago I reviewed some bulk pencils I had purchased from Musgrave, and came away impressed with the quality at the price point. Musgrave, however, had not updated their website in years, and the company appeared to rely heavily on advertising and specialty pencils, as well as white labeling (i.e., making pencils for other brands). In 2018, things changed, as Musgrave hired a new marketing team and started development on a new product line. You can hear more about Musgrave’s transformation on Episode 134 of the Erasable Podcast, featuring creative directors Nicole and Tim Delger, the team behind the Musgrave rebranding.
The Musgrave Harvest 320 “Professional,” shown here atop a Write Notepads Reporter Notebook (now available in an eye-popping red). Write Notepads and Baron Fig remain my preferred paper for pencils due to the texture and slightly tactile feel.
So What’s Behind the “Heritage” Tagline?
Musgrave has been making pencils in Shelbyville since 1916, so they’ve witnessed multiple shifts in the pencil industry during their more than a century in business. These changes included the move in the 1960s-1970s from traditional Tennessee Red Cedar to California Incense Cedar, which today remains the preferred wood for making pencils (though companies have shifted to other sources as even Incense Cedar has become scarcer and more expensive). The new Musgrave website features a comprehensive company history, including a bunch of unique photos from the pre-WWII era.
Musgrave’s new “Heritage” collection is headlined by the “Tennessee Red,” made from the same Tennessee Red Cedar used in American pencil-making all those years ago. Apparently, Musgrave discovered a source for Tennessee Red Cedar slats, which they used to create these gorgeous, highly aromatic wood-grain pencils that, to me, smell like cedar should. If you’ve ever been inside a cedar closet or stuck your head inside a wooden chest made from red cedar, you’ll know which smell I’m talking about. Musgrave also updated their signature “Harvest” yellow No. 2 pencil to include a “professional” version made from Incense Cedar, and even released a “Single Barrel 106” pencil made from vintage (i.e. 1930s) Red Cedar pencil slats.
My favorite thing about the Tennessee Reds is the variation in the wood grain. And the Tri-Star logo. As a Middle Tennessee native and (mostly) lifelong resident, I’ll buy anything with the Tri-Star.
The core that Musgrave uses is perfect for my style of writing. While it’s labeled a “No. 2” (at least on the Harvest), to me it writes more like a 2B or a No. 1, my preferred grades of graphite. Both pencils have excellent point retention for graphite this dark, and while one drawback is that Musgrave’s cores can have a tendency to smudge, that’s a trade-off I’m personally happy to make.
These three Musgrave pencils all write a similarly dark line. Writing sample is on a Write Notepads Dot-Grid Spiral Notebook.
Both the Tennessee Red and the Harvest 320 Professional are “home run” products for Musgrave, and I’m ecstatic to see this iconic American company stake out a piece of today’s expanding market for high-end pencils. My sole wish would be for them to devote additional time to quality control (discussed further below) and to consider softening the hex shape, especially on the Harvest series. I mentioned in my prior review that Musgrave’s signature hexagonal pencil can be a bit uncomfortable to write with for long periods of time - those edges are sharp. I know that Musgrave is capable of smoothing things out a bit because they have made a series of extremely comfortable incense cedar pencils to accompany Write Notepads’ “In the Pines” and “Telegraph” limited edition pocket notebooks. I’d love to see them do this on a standard release, and given how much I love Musgrave’s core such a pencil would easily become my primary writer. (For some reason, probably due to the texture of the wood, the Tennessee Red feels less sharp.)
Musgrave pencils sharpen very well. The Harvest 320 is shown here with a point carved by a NUK single-stage long-point sharpener, possibly the best I’ve used, that was featured in this quarter’s C.W. Pencils Pencil Box Subscription. I hope they sell these sharpeners soon, because I want to buy a bunch!
A Note on Sharpening and Quality Control
The release of the Tennessee Red Cedar pencil has not been without minor controversy, which I feel I need to address briefly. The Musgrave website states that the supplier of the Red Cedar slats “wasn’t used to prepping slats for pencils,” and if the slats aren’t uniform, it can result in off-center cores. Musgrave’s site suggests that off-center cores are a purely aesthetic issue, but they’re not: an off-center core can affect a pencil’s ability to sharpen (though once you get them sharpened, they’re perfectly usable).
The pencil on the left had a badly off-center core, but I was still able to get it sharpened to a super-long, concave El Casco point. The Tennessee Red on the right had a centered core and sharpened just fine in the Carl Angel-5.
My entire order of 24 Tennessee Reds only contained 2 “bad” cores, and I was actually able to get both of these pencils to sharpen, though it took running them through my El Casco sharpener as both the Classroom Friendly and the KUM Masterpiece kept giving me an uneven point nearly covered by wood on one side. Personally, I think Musgrave should inspect these pencils before they ship to remove the duds. It was fairly easy for me to look at a handful and quickly spot the off-center cores. To their credit, from what I’ve heard Musgrave is more than willing to work with customers to make things right if you receive an order containing multiple unusable pencils. They have excellent customer service.
Twenty Musgrave Tennessee Reds. The controversy over “off-center cores” is somewhat overblown - of this fistful of pencils, only one is badly off-center (top center), which isn’t uncommon but when you are selling premium pencils, it’s a legitimate issue for customers.
Visit Musgrave’s New Online Shop
You can purchase the pencils featured in this review directly from Musgrave. As I mentioned above, Musgrave has redesigned their website, including their online store. While Musgrave manufactures a vast catalogue of pencils, both standard and novelty/promotional, the new retail strategy focuses on their “Heritage Collection,” such as the Tennessee Red and the Harvest 320 Professional, both of which you can purchase by the dozen, or in an engraved (and highly aromatic) red cedar box. Overall, these are excellent pencils made by a classic American stationery company, and pencils always present an opportunity to purchase quality stationery at relatively minimal cost. Both Tennessee Reds and Harvest pencils cost a whopping $9 per dozen (compared against $24.95 for a dozen Blackwings). If you’re a fan of darker pencils with an awesome story behind them, grab these now because they have received a lot of attention and I suspect there may be a run on them in the future.
Disclaimer: The products featured in this post were purchased with my own funds for my own use. I was not compensated in any way for this review. This post (and content linked to in this post) contains affiliate links and links to my own retail store.
