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Question:

I know they used quill pens for writing in Village times, but did they also have pencils?

Answer:

That's a good question! Yes, there were pencils in the 1830s, but they were smaller, rounder, and shorter than today's writing instruments. Pencils using graphite (sometimes called "black lead," although it's really "plumbago," a soft form of carbon combined with a little iron) have actually been around for centuries. Graphite was discovered in the 1400s, and a mine in Borrowdale, England, was the world's main source of it from 1564 until the 19th- century.

Early pencils were just small pieces of graphite wrapped in string, but eventually someone came up with the idea to lay strips of graphite into grooved boards, which were cut out, rounded into pencil shape, smoothed, and painted - usually black.

In 1795, a French chemist named Nicholas Jacques Conte came up with a way to mix clean, pulverized graphite with washed clay. He extruded this combination into spaghetti-like strands of "pencil lead," which he heated until it became hard and black. This is still the way most pencils are made today.

In the 1830s, the only valuable locality in the United States for graphite was the Sturbridge, Mass., Lead Mine (now Tantiusques Reservation), located just a few miles up the road from Old Sturbridge Village! Native Americans used the mine (mainly for body paint), until European settlers took over. In 1828, wealthy Boston entrepreneur Frederic Tudor bought the mine. He operated it for several years, but never made it profitable.

Mechanical pencils (called "ever pointed") were also around in Village times. Wooden pencils cost about a penny apiece; a silver mechanical one could cost about a dollar! The biggest problem with early pencils? They didn't have erasers!

One more thing to think about: even if they had pencils, people had a lot less paper in the 1830s. Maybe in a future column, we'll talk about how to write a letter in two different directions on the same sheet of paper (some-thing 19th-century people did to conserve stationery) and how much it cost to mail a letter!