Trump used pencils to sell tariffs. This factory in ‘Pencil City’ is split. At Musgrave Pencil Company in Shelbyville, Tennessee, politics rarely came up before this year. President Donald Trump’s tariff policies have changed that. Yesterday at 7:00 a.m. EDT
With orders down and grocery prices up, some employees quietly worry the president’s trade war will hurt their jobs, which have grown dependent on a global supply chain stymied by the tariffs. Others, including Glines, talk openly about how Trump makes sense when he talks about “winning,” especially against other countries.
Glines, 46, with calloused hands and wearing a graphite-stained tank top, chatted with his colleagues about tariffs during a 15-minute break last week in the factory parking lot.
“Nothing says USA anymore,” he said. “It’s all made everywhere else.”
“We need to make things local,” replied Jessy Farrar, 35, who transports finished pencils to the shipping department. “Go back to the way things used to be.”
Inside, Crystal Hammock, 56, offered colleagues a different view as she organized pencils into packages of three.
“We are not too sure about making America great this way,” she said.
Ivonne Garcia, 52, nodded, pressing labels onto boxes of scented pencils.
“I’ve been working here 22 years, and I’ve never seen a year like this,” she said. “Everything is very, very bad.”
Trump’s tariffs were meant to help U.S. manufacturers like Musgrave. But the pressure to drive down costs has made the company dependent on cheaper imports for raw materials. While their pencils are manufactured at a factory five minutes from Shelbyville’s Main Street, Musgrave erasers, graphite cores and wood come mostly from China.
About 75 years ago, this Bible Belt town with access to railroads and red cedars produced the majority of wood-cased pencils in the United States. But as manufacturing got less expensive overseas, the building across from Musgrave, once home to Empire Pencil Company, turned into storage for an auto body shop. These days, at least 20 percent of pencils purchased domestically are reportedly made in China, though experts say the share in reality is likely far greater. Horses, whiskey, chicken and spillover from booming Nashville 60 miles to the north now make up the economic backbone of the city, which is growing in population and wealth.
The political leanings of the area have changed since the governor of Tennessee bestowed the name “Pencil City” on Shelbyville in the 1950s and the vast majority of residents voted for Democrats. Last year, nearly 80 percent of voters opted for Trump in Bedford County, one of the most deeply Republican counties in a solidly GOP state. Residents here describe a laid-back, family-oriented community that fills every church parking lot on Sundays and wants to be left alone by the government — except for when it comes to keeping undocumented immigrants out of the country.
Trump, defending the tariffs, said Americans should embrace owning fewer pencils if it meant they would eventually be made at home. “They don’t need to have 250 pencils,” he said in a May 4 appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “They can have five.”
The example didn’t sit well even with some of Trump’s closest allies. Billionaire Elon Musk, who has been outspoken about opposing the president’s tariff gambit even as he has led the effort to cut the federal bureaucracy, used pencils to make a different point. An ardent supporter of free trade, Musk shared a video on X of economist Milton Friedman holding up a pencil to marvel that its parts came from all over the world.
That dissonance has trickled onto the factory floor at Musgrave.
On the parking lot bench, Glines and Farrar said they hoped people would start buying more American pencils. But they, too, had noticed that orders were slowing.
“I would hate to see the business shut down,” Farrar said. “But in the long run, it will be better for the country to make materials ourselves.”
“I agree for the long run,” Glines replied. “Material wise, we like it from America.”
Musgrave had weathered decades of globalization by tailoring its products to specialty uses — shorter for golf, flatter for carpentry, wrapped in designs for classrooms. Scott Johnson, the president of Musgrave and a descendant by marriage of its founders, wanted to build on that success. Before Trump took office, he had been working on securing more partnerships with niche markets and adding a Musgrave-branded line of colored pencils.
Johnson had also started to lay the groundwork to move his supply of wood out of China and into Vietnam and Indonesia. He was getting nervous about potential disruptions if the already fraught relationship between the U.S. and China worsened. But the shift was supposed to take years, moving slowly enough for him to find the right suppliers abroad while meeting demand and keeping prices low — a delicate process involving new infrastructure, coordination and trust that can take decades to solidify.
Then Trump announced the tariffs. Overnight, the cost of importing raw material for pencils almost tripled. At the same time, Trump urged shoppers to buy American-made products, even if it meant buying fewer of them — and held up pencils, along with strollers and toy dolls, as prime examples.
Johnson began crafting two strategies: one in the event that Trump was right and demand for American pencils surged, and another that would launch if sales fell because prices proved too high for shoppers already struggling with the effects of sweeping tariffs. The latter case could involve letting go at least some of his factory workers. At this homegrown company, family members and elementary school friends work side by side. Some employees have been there for more than 10 years.
So far, Johnson is keeping both options open. He has laid off nine workers — but he also has placed an order for wood grown in the southeastern part of the U.S. and found countries to supply erasers and ferrules, the metal tubes that crimp erasers to the wood. For graphite cores, however, finding replacements has proved difficult.
At an inventory meeting Tuesday in the conference room above the factory, Johnson studied a spreadsheet of price estimates.
“That one is more than double the tariffed price from China,” he said, looking the cost of graphite cores from the Czech Republic.
“Wow,” an employee replied.
“So,” he said. “We are still going to source graphite cores from China.”
On the factory floor, few workers knew specifics about the challenges of moving supply production out of China. But at least some of Musgrave’s 103 employees understood the types of changes the tariffs might cause — and were concerned enough to change their political outlook.
Garcia, born in Mexico, has never paid much attention to presidential elections. Politics, to her, rarely seem to matter. Even the issue of immigration, which she knew Trump talked about on the campaign trail, felt far away. She had been here legally for decades, and she generally supported the way the president talked about people who came improperly.
Then her grocery bill, normally $120 a week, shot up to $250 — a price that does not include the snacks or ice cream that she now skips but that she used to buy as a treat after a long day of work. Next, the orders seemed to slow down, and she heard people talking about pencil prices increasing. She figured few people could afford that.
“Every day we come to work, we don’t know if we will have enough work for everybody,” she said. She paused. “Nobody tells you it will be this bad.”
If Garcia could go back to November, she said, she would have actively supported former vice president Kamala Harris.
Still, like her colleagues, she hopes that Musgrave will flourish through this period of economic uncertainty — a possible outcome if Trump’s goal of bringing more manufacturing home works.
Back from break, Farrar walked past raw pencils shooting out of a machine, past the conveyor belt that painted them, and past an open box of ferrules stamped with “MADE IN CHINA.”
“I hope they find something local where they can get products from,” he said, “so we can keep going.”
This job had helped Farrar stay on his feet. He had come to Musgrave after nearly two decades in construction, a career that gave him a concussion, rope burn and knee pain just as the opioid epidemic started to grip the South. A doctor prescribed opioids for the pain, and — as with many others in this part of the country — an addiction grew. Farrar has been in recovery for about 13 years.
At Musgrave, Farrar’s knees did not hurt. Plus, he got to work alongside his brother, cousin and sister-in-law, all employees at the pencil factory. Born and raised in Shelbyville, he was saving up to buy a house for his high school sweetheart and their 6-year-old daughter. They have lived in public housing since they sold their double-wide trailer and acre and a half of land after the housing market crashed more than 15 years ago.
Farrar said he was okay losing his job if it meant the country was on a better path — one that would prioritize someone like him over aid to Ukraine. Trump, whom he backed in the past three elections, seemed to understand that.
“I’m not smart in the Republican, Democrat, all that stuff,” he said. “I look for whether they are trying to solve everyone else’s issues or the issues we have here in our country. We need help here.”
Farrar pushed boxes of carpenter pencils toward the shipping department.
“Hopefully within Trump’s term at least,” he said, “we can see some differences.”
He did not know it, but soon the wood in the pencils he was delivering would come from the U.S. That also meant their price would go up by at least 8 percent.
But not yet.
On Tuesday, he packed up a box of finished pencils made from Chinese poplar, glad he still had work.
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