Phil Whitmarsh starts a lot of conversations with an offbeat question: Have you ever played a 500-year-old guitar? Eventually, he’ll hand you Mary Kate. The instrument resembles a Fender Telecaster, the six-string synonymous with Americana twang and favored by artists like Bruce Springsteen and Keith Richards. Mary Kate looks and plays like a Telecaster, but the sound is different.
It’s the wood, says Whitmarsh. That wood once helped hold up the old Woolworth warehouse in Omaha’s historic Old Market. It’s not the only transformation.
In a few short years, Whitmarsh has crafted a curiosity into a small business, Old Market Guitarworks, creating quality instruments out of old wood from places like Memorial Stadium and an American battleship. In doing so, he has joined a growing movement of environmentally minded makers creating art out of recycled material. Whitmarsh lives in Lincoln and built a career consulting nonprofits before starting a publishing business.
He began crafting guitars during the pandemic after learning about a luthier in New York City turning wood reclaimed from historic buildings into one-of-a-kind instruments. “That really intrigued me,” he said. “I always wanted to build my own guitar.
” He started poking around and found someone selling wood from the Woolworth building. He bought 10 beams, not knowing how much would be usable. He also didn’t know its story.
The southern yellow pine — harvested when it was already 350 years old — trav.