WALTER POLEMAN'S SHELBURNE FARMS CUSTOM

UVM ecologist Walter Poleman brought me a slab of butternut, a length of figured sugar maple, some Brown Swiss cow bones, and a rock. All the materials came from Shelburne Farms, a truly beautiful place on the edge of Lake Champlain just south of where I live and work in Burlington. The butternut was a gift from Marshall Webb, who worked at the Farm for five decades and whose ancestors built the place. You can see Marshall cutting this particular butternut tree in the final image here. The maple came from our mutual friend (and b-bender enthusiast), Jeff Parsons, whose Beeken-Parsons furniture shop sits within the Farm Barn, maybe my favorite building in the world. Walter had a lot to tell me about how these ingredients are ecologically related. I’ll let him say more about that here:

“The body and the neck of this guitar are made from Butternut and Sugar Maple, trees that grow especially well in the calcium-rich soils of Shelburne Farms. The source of the calcium is the ancient shale and limestone bedrock that underlies the farmscape, and is embodied by the dark stone with white calcite vein embedded in the back of the guitar. The olive-green hue of the pickguard was chosen to honor the foliage of Northern White Cedar, a species that roots directly in the limey bluffs that form the shoreline of Lake Champlain. Shaped from the bone of a Brown Swiss cow that once grazed the pastures of Shelburne Farms, the nut on this place-based instrument is also an expression of the underlying calcium.”
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Butternut body, maple neck, acrylic pickguard, Lollar ‘64 and Special pickups, push-pull phase switching, matte nitrocellulose lacquer.