Started electric chicks? Thanks to Carl Engel, 1930s Hays, Kansas was living in the future and he left behind a roaring red pencil to prove it.

The world’s best (and only) Amish theme park amused central Illinois roadtrippers for over 70 years, and you could buy pencil souvenirs from the gift shop after challenging a chicken to tic-tac-toe.

The Memphis shop where Elvis bought underwear, B.B. King stopped in and Dr. King marched by also became a trusted Beale St. purveyor of roots, oils & other goods to get your Mojo working almost 50 years ago.

Next time you’re at the Golden Gate Bridge, Disney World, or on the streets of Chicago, look down and you'll spot the legacy of a post-Civil War iron master who turned a Wisconsin plow forge into a fundamental part of urban America, with a little help from shop pencils.

The history of the Motor City's library was written with a red pencil handed out by Garfield in the big '80s, 124 years after Thomas Edison was the first boy genius to roam the stacks.

America’s most famous songwriter. A disinherited flapper heiress. A silver miner who hit the mother lode. Their stories are all united with a simple pencil that was the Jazz Age's text messager of choice.

To celebrate National Pencil Day, Graphite Confidential's inaugural newsreel uncovers the shocking truth about the advertising pencils made to advertise the making of... advertising pencils. Say that 10 times fast!

A runaway CEO! A mysterious stabbing! A self-reversing bankruptcy! Tucumcari Ice & Coal fueled a tiny N.M. railroad town and Route 66 byway with more than its share of small-town intrigue, and the townsfolk pencilled it all in along the way.

Generations of Haertel brothers marked the graves of countless upper-midwesterners, making a name for themselves that is literally still set in stone. Heck, their pencils are even granite colored. 

In the future backyard of the Obamas, a Sears mogul's epic museum of American progress took root in the White City's last palace at the height of the Great Depression, and got its own telephone exchange that still works.

They made noodles and pie at the Kansas State Fair to save the church in 1948, but now the South Hutchinson UMC's wholesome goodies remain a tradition, and we found a pencil that has survived decades to tell the story.

In 1934 Manhattan, Mayor LaGuardia was among the celebrities that bought these pencils manufactured and sold by blind folks in an East Side factory that fed and clothed thousands of destitute, sightless New Yorkers.

Laura Ingalls Wilder would have starved if she and her Pa and Ma hadn’t done time serving rough customers at the Chicago and North Western railroad camp in Dakota Territory when the future authoress was just 12.