Back to school with Indiana pencils.

• Author: Mckinney, Jim
• Position: Harcourt Pencil Co. - Made in Indiana - Company Profile

President Abraham Lincoln used one to print his Gettysburg address. Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway wrote novels with them. Thomas Edison's custom-made, three-inch models played a part in the invention of the light bulb.

Pencils date back to 1564, when a large deposit of graphite was found in England. Nearly a century later, pencils were mass produced in wood casings in Nuremberg, Germany. Today they are seven inches long when new, and good for 17 sharpenings.

In the spring of 1993, the Harcourt Pencil Co. in the Rush County town of Milroy decided to make its own pencils. The Harcourt family had been selling pencils in vending machines at schools nationwide since the mid-1950s. Previously, it had purchased other manufacturers' pencils and did the coloring and imprinting before marketing them.

Even pencil wood is not above controversy, politics and foreign competition. Pencils made of jelutong wood have been flooding the American market lately. The wood comes from Indonesian and Taiwanese rain forests, stirring controversy both because of the environmental implications of rain-forest clearing and the loss of American jobs in the pencil industry.

But Harcourt Pencil prefers the quality of incensed cedar, even though the material is more costly than jelutong. Cedar has a rich, distinctive smell.

The wood arrives in slats, which go into a grooving machine. Graphite is inserted into the grooved slats, then two slats are sandwiched together around the lead and glued.

Large clamps press the slats together for overnight drying, then the wood is sawed into pencil length.

Next it's time to pretty up the product. A painting machine can paint up to 800 pencils a minute. Pencils get four to eight coats of paint, with fluorescent colors needing more. Harcourt pencils come in 35 colors, and the company prints messages on them, usually the name of the school.

In the final stage, a tipper machine attaches ferrules and erasers.

Harcourt produces about 200,000 pencils a day. The products are geared toward the kindergarten through eighth-grade market, and...