The towns of Acton and Concord were also instrumental in the development of the modern day pencil industry. Concordian William Munroe is credited with being the first to manufacture wooden pencils in the United States in 1812. Acton resident Ebenezer Wood found Munroe's manufacturing methods painstakingly slow and set out to automate the process at his mill on in North Acton, along the old Davis Road. Wood became the first to use a circular saw to speed the cutting and a gluing process that could make 144 pencils at once. His process improvements created pencils in either hexagonal or octagonal shapes. These shapes have become standard. Wood never patented his invention and shared his improvements with others, including Eberhardt Faber of New York. Faber became the country's leading manufacturer of pencils. In the latter half of the century, industry continued to grow in Acton with the establishment of a cigar factory and a piano stool factory