Inside One of America’s Last Pencil Factories

Since 1889, the General Pencil Company has been converting huge quantities of raw materials (wax, paint, cedar planks, graphite) into products you can find, neatly boxed and labeled, in art and office-supply stores across the nation: watercolor pencils, editing pencils, sticks of charcoal, pastel chalks.

This photo essay about the factory shows us the incidental beauty of objects we tend to take for granted.