Joseph Dixon, graphite and a fort’s name.

Ticonderoga is a pencil brand that grew out of a graphite business. On its own history page, the brand traces its roots to Joseph Dixon, who it says was born in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and experimented with pencils from an early age. The page dates the first Dixon pencils, made from cedar slabs, graphite and clay, to 1822. A 2013 report in the Orlando Sentinel gives a different date, saying Dixon began making pencils in the 1830s; the two accounts do not agree on the year.

Graphite crucibles were the larger trade. Ticonderoga says Dixon developed a heat-resistant crucible and, in 1827, founded the Dixon Crucible Company in Salem, Massachusetts. The brand says the crucibles came into wide use in iron and steel production during the Mexican–American War, and that in 1847 Dixon built a crucible factory in New Jersey. The Orlando Sentinel reported that the company kept its headquarters in Jersey City until 1983.

The pencil business grew alongside the crucibles. The brand’s timeline says demand for pencils rose during the American Civil War, when soldiers needed something sturdier than quill pens, and that the company developed machinery to produce pencils in quantity. It dates the addition of erasers to its pencils to 1876.

The pencil that carries the brand’s name came later. Ticonderoga says the yellow No. 2 Ticonderoga pencil was introduced in 1913. It names Fort Ticonderoga as the pencil’s namesake. The brand says the pencil was first made with a brass ferrule, the metal band that holds the eraser, and that during the Second World War metal rationing led to a temporary switch to green plastic. After the war, it says, the green-and-yellow colour scheme continued on a metal ferrule.

Rockwell, radio and a 1982 merger.

The brand’s advertising history is told largely through its own timeline. Ticonderoga says that its advertising manager, John J. Leckie, engaged American artists to paint scenes of heroic deeds tied to Fort Ticonderoga, along with nostalgic images of the pencil itself. It says Norman Rockwell painted several advertisements for the pencil, including a work titled His First Pencil in 1919.

Radio followed. The timeline says that in 1943 the company sponsored a series of dramatised announcements called “Ticonderoga’s famous radio minutes,” part history lesson and part newsreel, and that it produced 53 of them. For the pencil’s 50th anniversary in 1963, the brand says, the company sent “colorful do-it-yourself pencil kits” to dealers, newspapers and others as part of a year-long campaign.

The company took its present name in 1982. Both the brand’s history page and the Orlando Sentinel describe a merger of the Joseph Dixon Crucible Company with the Bryn Mawr Corporation, a Pennsylvania company; the brand describes Bryn Mawr as a transportation and real-estate business, and the Sentinel says it dated back to 1795. The combined business became the Dixon Ticonderoga Company, the name it still uses.

The headquarters moved south soon afterwards. According to the Orlando Sentinel, the company moved from Jersey City to Vero Beach, Florida, in 1983, and to Central Florida in 1990; in 2013 the paper placed its head office in Heathrow, in Seminole County. The brand’s own timeline adds that in 2019 Dixon Ticonderoga officially moved its headquarters to Appleton, Wisconsin.

On manufacturing, the Sentinel reported in 2013 that the pencils were made of cedar with glued-on erasers, that the company had operations ranging from China to Macon, Georgia, and that it made no products in Central Florida, where its headquarters staff worked. The same report said ESPN football analyst Lee Corso, often seen holding a Ticonderoga pencil on television, was a former director of business development for the company and by then a consultant.

Design and documentation.

School-supply brands sit in an unusual corner of design. Their products are bought in a short season, often by parents for children, and are then carried, opened, dropped and swapped for months in classrooms and lockers. A pencil, a binder or a notebook has to work at the scale of a box on a shelf as well as a cover held in the hand, and its look often changes from one school year to the next.

The identity of a school-supply brand is often carried less by a logo than by a colour, a cover design or a familiar format, because the company behind the name may have merged, changed owners or moved its production far from where it began. That makes the plain questions worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its look has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

An Italian group’s American pencil.

Ticonderoga has had an Italian owner since the mid-2000s. The Orlando Sentinel reported in 2013 that F.I.L.A. – Fabbrica Italiana Lapis ed Affini S.p.A., an Italian manufacturer of writing equipment, bought Dixon Ticonderoga in 2005, and the brand’s own history page says the company joined the F.I.L.A. Group that year. F.I.L.A. has owned Ticonderoga since 2005. English Wikipedia says the group was founded in Florence in 1920 and has had its head office in the Milan area since 1959.

Under F.I.L.A., Dixon Ticonderoga has sat alongside other art and school brands. The Sentinel reported that the company had sold Prang markers and paints for years, had bought the Lyra line of coloured pencils a few years before 2013, and was pushing further into art and craft products. Its chief executive at the time told the paper that the company was “not just a pencil company” but also an arts-and-crafts company.

The pencil range has widened too. Ticonderoga’s timeline records the introduction in 2024 of a Two-Hole Pencil Sharpener, which it describes as a German-engineered design able to sharpen its standard pencils as well as its larger My First and Laddie sizes.

For a design guide, Ticonderoga shows how a single object can carry a brand on its own: a yellow hexagonal pencil, a green-and-yellow ferrule and a name borrowed from a fort. Compare another American pencil with a distinctive ferrule in our Blackwing brand guidelines and another school-supply staple in our Paper Mate brand guidelines. For this guide we use pencil yellow, ferrule green and graphite with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Ticonderoga’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.