Monday answer
Dan will have to determine if a star is forthcoming. I'm thinking that he was referring to cedar wood which is the outer casing for the item. I'm not sure if he had the name of the person. John got the wood correct but not the proper item or the name I expected. This may surprise. The man was Henry David Thoreau. The Walden Pond Thoreau.
The item was pencil. His family made quite a good living from them and he engineered much of what made them successful. Graphite or what was then called plumbago was a hard item to find in purer forms. The English had the best graphite material and the French had the methodology (see Nicolas Jacques Conte). Keep in mind that engineers and artists as well as business people needed good pencils that could be hard or soft and also sharpened to a broad or very fine point. The Thoreau family from the 1820�s were involved with making pencils, but they were inferior to the English and French and German types. It seems that independently, but using the German (Faber) pencil as a guide, Henry David Thoreau (a Harvard grad) reasoned independently if graphite was ground into a very, very, fine powder and clay added as a binder, then a pencil of different hardnesses could be made. More clay, harder "lead". Previously the graphite was less fine and a binder of wax and whale spermaceti made up the �lead�. It was greasy, unreliable, poor quality control, and messy. The mill used by the Thoreau family that made the powder ground the graphite on millstones and a fan blew it up a �chimney�. The finest powder was diverted to a box near the top and the heavier product fell and was reground. The good stuff was mixed with clay, made into a paste, extruded, or applied into a U shaped cedar case and a top glued on. The pencil case was then rounded. The �lead� was square. The Thoreau's had an interesting marketing philosophy not for here, but it involved the idea of �New� and �Improved�, testamonials, and different labels and hardness designations (1-4 and soft to hard), presumably to make people buy a specialized pencil for every occasion and/or replace or add an additional item with another almost identical item. They also made �premium� pencils costing as much as twenty five cents each. Techniques still used today. By the 1860�s the Germans won out and the Thoreau family got out of the pencil business to exclusively make very fine powders that were used in electrotyping.
Thoreau's landlord, by the way, was Ralph Waldo Emerson on whose land was Walden Pond. Once close friends, after some bad advice on a book deal suggested by Emerson they became distant--hence the rather negative statement at the time of Thoreau's death.