Field Notes—

Cedar Trees: Penciling In Their History

By Dottie Evans

Ever wonder how they put the lead inside a lead pencil?

While studying up on Eastern red cedar trees, I became hopelessly sidetracked after learning that most of the world’s 14 billion pencils are made from cedar wood, and it’s really not lead inside those pencils, it’s graphite.

Before I knew it, I was Googling “graphite pencils” and transported back to Borrowdale, England, in the early 1500s when it seems a terrible windstorm blew down a stand of trees, thereby exposing a broad layer of black, carbonlike material under the roots.

Local folk thought this material might be coal — but it didn’t burn, so they called it lead and tried writing with it. Before long, artisans and craftsmen were using chunks of it to draw semipermanent marks on wood and stone without scoring or damaging the surface.

By 1558, in the early days of Queen Elizabeth, word of the new drafting material spread to Europe via the Flemish traders, and in 1565, Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner began using pieces of this wonderful so-called “black lead” to sketch pictures of fanciful and real beasts for his History of Animals.

Perhaps impatient at having to constantly wash the smudgy stuff off his fingertips, Gesner came up with the idea of wrapping the piece of graphite with cloth or string. He also figured this would allow the user to unwind the cord from the writing end as the nub wore down.

Now we were getting somewhere.

The Italians tried stuffing the soft graphite into a piece of solid wood after first drilling a hole. This process proved terribly cumbersome and the product was too fragile. I imagined Leonardo or Michelangelo discarding one broken proto-pencil after another in disgust.

Enter the Germans, who came up with the first mass-produced pencils in Nuremberg in 1662 that were pressed firmly inside a piece of wood. In 1795, a Frenchman named Conte added clay to graphite and fired it to make it more durable. He was the genius who thought of cutting a strip of wood in half and notching it, then sliding the rod of hardened graphite into the notch and gluing the two halves together for a much stronger bond.

Early American colonists used Conte pencils imported from Europe until the Revolutionary War cut off their supply. I like to picture Benjamin Franklin carrying a fancy French penknife to sharpen and shape his nubs.

But to err is human. Artists, almanac editors, and tax accountants alike — they all kept making mistakes. This meant they needed to use wads of India rubber (which was actually brought back to Europe in 1736 from the South American Indians, and not from East India) to rub out their errors. Early rubber was extremely perishable. It not only melted in the heat and cracked in the cold, but it reportedly began smelling like dead fish after three days’ use.

The Americans got into the act when New Haven inventor Charles Goodyear, in 1839, figured out how to cure rubber. Now people could use their newly vulcanized rubber erasers without worrying about spoilage — except they kept misplacing the darn things.

Finally, in a Eureka moment in 1858, Hyman Lipman of Philadelphia came up with the brilliant solution of crimping a bit of vulcanized eraser onto one end of a pencil. tThree years later, in 1861, Eberhard Faber built the first United States pencil factory in New York City.

And the wood that Eberhard used to encase those early American pencils was Eastern red cedar.

The Ubiquitous

Cedar Tree

Chances are, if you’ve got an unmowed field on your property, you’ve noticed a few young cedar trees poking up through the tall grass. Cedars are the leaders in the field-to-forest succession parade, to be followed by the hardwoods and then the evergreens.

Early colonists valued cedar for its inherent oils that repelled insects and its straight growth habit. It was ideal for making fence posts, building log cabins, and creating furniture and cabinets.

Birds and wildlife use cedar trees for shelter, and birds eat the abundant berries year round, inadvertently scattering the seed and ensuring there will always be more cedars. From Nova Scotia to Florida, and west to the Dakotas and Texas, Eastern red cedars are everywhere. They are native to 37 states.

So, the next time you pick up a #2 lead pencil to solve a crossword puzzle, take a test, or make a list, give credit to all those inventors who kept tweaking the design.

Also, give thanks for the ubiquitous Eastern red cedar that provided the perfect medium for enclosing that slim stick of lead, er, graphite.

Oh, and taxonomically, they aren’t actually cedars. They’re junipers.