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 — traveled up the Missouri River in the late 1800s. In 1887, the beams became part of one of Omaha’s then-biggest buildings, a five-story warehouse that housed an array of companies over the years before being renovated into lofts. James M.
Woolworth, one of Omaha’s first tycoons, spent $125,000 on its construction — millions of dollars today. Whitmarsh had the materials and a workshop in the Nebraska Innovation Studio, but he needed a guitarist to showcase his work. He recruited his high school friend Benjamin Kushner.
A pillar of the Lincoln music community, Kushner played guitar in local stalwarts such as the Mezcal Brothers and Josh Hoyer and Soul Colossal. He died earlier this year from cancer. He was 59.
“He's one of those guys that you kind of always wish you were like,” Whitmarsh said. “He was just the nicest guy, and he could play anything and he could play any genre of music.” Kushner had a penchant for Telecasters, so it made sense to start there.
Whitmarsh got to work, crafting a prototype for his friend to try. “He said, ‘wow, we’re onto something. This sounds really good,’” Whitmarsh recalled.
Whitmarsh was hooked. He developed a “radar” for reclaimed wood, which led him to discover that the USS Texas, a battleship that played a role in the D-Day invasion, was undergoing a renovation and that wood from the ship’s deck was available. He received enough to build two guitars and a bass.
One guitar built from that wood and signed by country star Sam Hunt (whose grandfather served on the battleship) sold for $7,000 during a recent auction. Whitmarsh is relentless when it comes to getting his instruments in the hands of touring artists, primarily at Lincoln’s Zoo Bar. Most are happy to take the guitars for a spin during soundcheck or during their set.
Touring musicians Chris Duarte, Tim “Too Slim” Langford and Daniel Donato have all tested a Whitmarsh guitar, as have local artists like Kris Lager, Hector Anchondo and Mike McCracken. Donato, a rising alternative country artist played Mary Kate for his entire Zoo Bar performance in 2022. Shawn “Lil Slim” Holt, son of Chicago blues legend Magic Slim and an accomplished blues guitarist, praised the instruments' warm sound and playability.
“They were built extremely well,” Holt said. “As far as the historic wood that was used to make them, it makes it more exciting to play.” Plucking heartstrings Whitmarsh’s father, an architect, instilled a love for artisanship in his son, as well as respect for the materials.
His parents weren’t hippies, he said, but they were outdoorsy, ecologically minded people. They believed in something they called energy transfer. “Imagine every heartbeat, every breath around that wood goes into that wood, just like the vibrations from all that equipment,” he said.
“Not only are those vibrations seasoning this material, so are the heartbeats, so are the breaths. Imagine hitting a string or a chord and knowing with all certainty that you're giving them new breath, you're giving them new heartbeats, you're putting that energy out into the world with your creativity.” That’s what he told representatives from Snap-on, a Wisconsin-based manufacturer, during their visit to the Innovation Studio after he learned the company’s oldest factory was nearing its 100th anniversary.
Whitmarsh’s words moved the representatives enough that they offered him wood from the building, which he used to build three guitars and an amplifier. “This is something that has lived another life,” Whitmarsh said. “I’ve kept it out of a dump.
” In 2018, 12 million tons of wood went to a landfill, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Only 3 million tons were recycled. But that number is going up — in 1990, only 130,000 tons found another lease on life.
Whitmarsh’s impact may be relatively small, but he’s part of the trend toward reclamation. He’s also not the only craftsman at the Innovation Studio — a community makerspace housed on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Innovation Campus — who sees the potential of reclaimed wood. Seth Wright owns Scrappy Woodworks, a business that upcycles reclaimed wood into “handmade treasures.
” “There’s a sense of uniqueness, a sense of storytelling and sentimental value,” Wright said. “It depends on who the customer is, but it’s all got a value add.” Many at the makerspace use reclaimed wood, said Innovation Studio Director David Martin.
But Whitmarsh’s approach is novel. “People have used everything from old barn wood to reclaimed gym floors to discarded skateboard decks,” Martin said. “What Phil does is somewhat unique in that the history of the wood is so important to the guitars he creates.
” Large guitar makers are secretive about how they source their tone woods. Whitmarsh is not. He will tell you exactly where he found that swamp ash or yellow pine that he transformed into the guitar you’re strumming.
“One of the things I pledge to do for myself ...
is that I want to find wood with a story,” he said. “It comes back to not wanting to be a cookie cutter thing. I want people to be able to play a guitar and for it to have meaning for them.
” ‘It’s about spirit’ When Whitmarsh first cut into old bleachers from Memorial Stadium, he said years of Runza sandwiches and Valentino’s pizza had left their olfactory imprint. Breaking the seal unleashed decades of Husker memories encased in pine. Whitmarsh saw the old bleachers for sale online and thought he might as well ask the university if they had more sitting around.
He learned there was a warehouse full of wood — Alaskan white pine, “one of the best sounding, densest woods” that exists. “And it's beautiful. It's creamy, it's just a wonderful color,” he said.
He’s made three bodies from the bleacher wood so far. Once he has a finished guitar, he’ll give it to the Husker athletics department – a gift that Whitmarsh hopes will amp up awareness of his budding business. Whitmarsh is also working on guitars with pieces of what he believes is the original Pershing Auditorium stage.
The Lincoln venue, which for decades hosted some of the world’s biggest touring acts, came down last year after a grass-roots group saved the iconic mosaic mural that graced the outside of the building. Recently, Whitmarsh obtained material that’s not just part of Nebraska history, but the nation’s. This wood came from the clinic built in Walthill by the nation’s first Native American physician, Susan La Flesche Picotte of the Omaha Tribe.
The clinic, built in 1913, is in the midst of a renovation. Whitmarsh contacted local leaders about taking some of the landfill-bound wood for repurposing. “There’s already, for me, a certain amount of reverence for the material knowing that it has seen life,” he said.
“It’s impossible not to wonder what it must have been like.” Those working to preserve La Flesche Picotte’s legacy saw the potential in encouraging Nebraska artists to celebrate her work and ongoing impact in Indigenous communities. “Anything which brings attention to Dr.
Susan's remarkable story and work, or the lives of her extraordinary father and siblings ...
helps to show the achievements of Nebraska's native people,” said Nancy Gillis, secretary of the Picotte Center Board of Directors. “Mr. Whitmarsh's talents will undoubtedly spur interest in our project from people who admire his work – another way to open dialogue to tell the story.
” He has visions of a future working with national historic brands to tell their stories through instruments, but for now he’s happy to work with what’s available. In the end, he knows he’s giving historic wood the encore it deserves. “There are ways of repurposing things that make this material really valuable,” he said.
“It’s about character and it’s about spirit.” The Flatwater Free Press is Nebraska’s first independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories that matter..
