When Henry David Thoreau set out for a life of isolated self-sufficiency by Walden Pond, he made an account of all the necessities he bought for his time there: food, clothing, farming needs, and even the materials he used to build his own house. But something has been strangely omitted: a writing utensil, which he must have had in order to write the memoir later published as Walden. In fact, despite all the mentions in Walden of his reading and writing, Thoreau never mentions using a pencil -- quite odd, considering that before Henry David Thoreau was a famous writer, philosopher, and key player in the Transcendentalist movement, he was actually a brilliant pencil maker who revolutionized the way pencils were manufactured in the United States.

March 30th, which is National Pencil Day, commemorates the day in 1858 when Philadelphia immigrant Hymen Lipman patented his invention for a pencil with an eraser on top, creating the conveniently-designed pencil we know and love. But just decades before Lipman's design, American pencil-making was in sorry shape. Poor materials made domestic pencils smudgy and frail in comparison to their superior British counterparts, which were made of purer graphite. In France, an inventor named Nicolas-Jacques Conté came up with a method to make high-quality pencils out of impure graphite by mixing it with clay, but this process was not known across the Atlantic.

A portrait of Henry David Thoreau attributed to his sister, though this has not been authenticated.

That's when Thoreau comes into the picture. Seeking employment after studying at Harvard, he worked at his father's pencil factory, which Edward Emerson -- son of Ralph Waldo Emerson -- recalled as being somewhat better than the typical American pencil factory at the time. Still, Henry David Thoreau aspired to improve the family business, so he hit the books at the Harvard College library to find out more.

We're not sure what Thoreau learned, but according to engineering historian Henry Petroski in his thorough history of pencil making, it was "highly unlikely" that Thoreau had access to information about the Conté process, nor a similar method for pencil making that was employed in Germany at the time. It's possible that Thoreau was inspired by a different process using a mix of graphite and clay -- which was used for coating crucibles -- but in any case, he began to experiment. Having no knowledge of chemistry, Henry David nevertheless came up with a formula to make a pencil rivaling that made in Europe. It was the first of its kind in America.

Soon, Thoreau pencils were taking over the market, and the family's business grew and grew. Thoreau pencils were awarded twice by Mechanic Associations and gained a local reputation in Boston for their quality. Ralph Waldo Emerson himself praised them. News of Thoreau's pencils spread quickly, and soon, Petroski writes, they were "without peer in this country."

But of course, Thoreau did not feel that pencil-making was in the cards for him -- shortly after the boom in the family business, he left for Walden Pond, beginning the journey that led him to philosophy and literature. As Edward Emerson notes, many people in Concord criticized Henry David for leaving behind a profitable enterprise to "idle in the woods." Indeed, Thoreau did not achieve notoriety in his lifetime; his books did not sell well and he had to make a living as a land surveyor. He returned to the pencil business later on, but notably, he rarely wrote about pencil-making in spite of his miraculous scientific achievements in the field and the years he dedicated to the craft.

As technology threatens to render longhand writing completely obsolete, Thoreaus' dual careers as a pencil-maker and an advocate for simple, minimalist living seem perfectly in synch, albeit by coincidence. The pencil made by Thoreau, housed in our collections, is a product of Thoreau's engineering brain, but it's also a testament to his connection with nature and his commitment to self-sufficiency -- not only did he make his own shelter and food, he made his own means to write. In our own special way, the Library has subtly commemorated Thoreau's dual contributions to "writing" in this plaque on Library Way:

Henry David Thoreau's plaque on Library Way. Quote from The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee.

Happy National Pencil Day, everyone!

Works Cited

Henry Thoreau as Remembered by a Young Friend, Edward Emerson.

The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance, Henry Petroski.

Picturing Thoreau: Henry David Thoreau in American Visual Culture, Mark W. Sullivan.

A Thoreau Iconography, Thomas Blanding and Walter Harding.

Walden, Henry David Thoreau.

The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee.