National Pencil Company

The National Pencil Company (NPCo), born April 8, 1908, was a Jewish-owned manufacturing aggregate with its business office and factory headquarters (HQ) in a four-story building located on 37-41 South Forsyth Street in the heart of Atlanta’s industrial sector. The factory was formerly the Venable Hotel and, for a short time, the Granite Hotel. In physical size, each of the four floors, plus an earthen floor basement, were fourteen feet high, eighty feet wide, and two hundred feet long.

In 1913, the NPCo had more than 170 employees–more girls than boys, according to Leo Frank (State’s Exhibit B, April 28, 1913). Most of the laborers at the NPCo were preteen and teenaged children who worked ten-hour shifts five days week and a half day on Saturday, toiling for mere pennies an hour. Atlanta unofficially allowed children as young as eight to ten years old to work in factories and mills. At the NPCo, most of the employees were in the age range of eleven to sixteen years, which was considered acceptable at the time. Given the widespread extreme poverty, people tended to look the other way, begrudgingly and indignant, for practical reasons.

In total, the National Pencil Company had three subsidiaries: the slat wood mill, which processed cedar into polygonal pencil shafts; the bell lead smelting plant, which produced the thin lead rods inserted in the center of the pencil shafts; and the NPCo factory HQ, where the final assembly occurred, before the packaged boxes containing gross pencil inventory were shipped out to various middlemen and direct clients.