The Casket Works Dumped Walnut Offcuts at His Gate for 16 Years — He Built a $500,000 Gunstock Brand

On a Tuesday morning in March of 1987, EMTT Holloway stood in his driveway in Plat County, Nebraska, and watched a flatbed truck back up to his gate and dump a load of walnut slabs that nobody wanted. The driver didn’t get out. He just knocked the load loose with a hydraulic ram, gave a short wave through the windshield, and drove back the way he’d come.

EMTT stood there in the cold with his coffee going cold in his hand, looking at a pile of irregular walnut offcuts. Some of them 4 ft long, some of them 8 in wide, all of them crooked or figured or forked in ways that made them useless to the casket factory in Columbus that had been generating them since 1971.

The pile was maybe two cords. It smelled like fresh cut walnut, which is one of the finest smells in the world if you know what walnut is worth and one of the most maddening smells in the world if you don’t yet know what you’re going to do with it. EMTT Holloway was 51 years old that morning.

He had farmed 340 acres in Platt County for 26 years, raised three kids on it, buried one wife on it, and was in the process of watching commodity corn prices do to his operation. What commodity corn prices were doing to every operation like his in 1987, which was not anything good. He had a shop behind his house that was larger than the house itself, a lathe he’d owned since 1968, a band saw that had belonged to his father-in-law, and a set of hand tools accumulated over 30 years of fixing everything that broke rather than replacing it. He was not a gunsmith. He

was not a woodworker by trade. He was a farmer who fixed things, which in Plat County, Nebraska in 1987 was the same thing as saying he was a man who understood materials. Let me tell you about how that pile of walnut came to be at his gate. Because the story doesn’t start with EMTT. It starts with the consolidated casket works in Columbus, Nebraska, which had been making burial caskets since 1919 and which by the 1980s was one of the largest casket manufacturers in the state. Casket manufacturing is a precise

and unforgiven industry. The walnut they used had to be clear, straight grained, free of figure, free of crotchwood, free of the wild swirling grain patterns that make a piece of walnut beautiful to a woodworker but structurally unpredictable in a production environment. Every load of walnut lumber that came into the consolidated yard was graded, and the pieces that didn’t meet speck were pulled and stacked.

For years, they’d burn them. Then a man named Harold Severt, who ran the yard, decided it was cheaper to give them away than to pay to dispose of them. And he started calling around to farmers in the county who had shops and wood stoves and might want free hardwood. EMTT had said yes in 1971 without thinking much about it.

He’d burned the first several loads. Then one afternoon in 1974, he’d picked up a piece from the pile, a slab about 30 in long, 5 in wide, with a grain figure that curled and swirled like water going around a rock. And he’d stood there in his shop for a long time, just holding it, turning it in the light from the window, and something had shifted in him.

He didn’t burn that piece. He set it on his workbench and looked at it for 3 days before he picked up a draw knife. What he made from it the first time was not good. He knew it wasn’t good. He’d been around enough rifles to know what a guntock was supposed to look like and feel like, and what he made from that first piece of figured walnut looked like what it was, which was a first attempt by a man who had never made one before.

but it fit his hands in a way that surprised him. And the wood itself, the color, the depth of the figure, the way it seemed to have light moving inside it when you tilted it was so far beyond anything he’d seen on the production rifles at the hardware store in Columbus that he set it aside and started the next one. That was 1974.

By 1987, when the casket works dumped that two cord load at his gate, EMTT Holloway had made 41 guntocks. He had given most of them away to neighbors and to his sons. He had sold three of them for prices that seemed reasonable at the time, and that he would later understand were absurdly low.

He had learned through 13 years of working walnut offcuts on a farm lathe with a hand tools and a band saw. Things about black walnut that most professional woodworkers never learn because most professional woodworkers never work the same species of wood for 13 years using pieces that came from the same regional timber source.

He knew how Plat County walnut moved when it dried. He knew how it responded to oil versus wax versus lacquer. He knew which grain orientations were stable and which ones would check in the first winter. He knew from having ruined 23 stocks over 13 years, exactly where the wood would fail, and exactly how to prevent it.

He did not know in March of 1987 that he was about to become a manufacturer. Let me tell you about what was happening in the gunstock market in 1987 because you need to understand the world EMTT was about to walk into. American firearms manufacturers in the 1980s were in the middle of a transition that most of them didn’t fully understand yet.

The cost of quality walnut had been rising steadily since the 1960s, driven by demand from European furniture makers and Japanese buyers who had discovered American black walnut and were paying prices for it that domestic manufacturers couldn’t easily match. The response from American rifle makers was predictable. They started substituting.

Synthetic stocks appeared first on military rifles, then on hunting rifles, then on everything. By 1987, a significant percentage of production hunting rifles came with synthetic stocks as standard, and the walnut stocks that were still being made were thinner, lighter, and cut from lower grade wood than what had been standard in 1965.

The figured walnut stocks that had been common on mid-grade rifles in the 1950s, the kind with real grain figure, real depth, real color variation, had migrated almost entirely to the custom market where they were being sold by a small number of stock makers for prices that started at $400 and climbed quickly past $1,000.

EMTT knew about the custom stock makers. He had a copy of a trade directory that listed them and he had written to three of them in the early 1980s asking questions about their work. Two of them didn’t write back. One of them, a man in Oregon named Carlton Whitmore, who had been making stocks since 1958, wrote back a letter that was four pages long and that EMTT kept in a folder in his desk drawer for the rest of his life.

Whitmore told him about wood selection, about the geometry of stock fitting, about the relationship between pull length and comb height, and the way a stock has to account for the human body in a way that production stocks never do. He told him that the market for quality custom stocks was real and growing, and that the men who were doing it well were doing it with wood that was increasingly hard to find.

He told him that regional walnut wood from the same geographic area dried and worked by someone who understood its specific characteristics was worth more than generic claro or English walnut because the person working it had knowledge that couldn’t be bought. EMTT read that letter many times. Then he went back to his shop and kept making stocks for neighbors.

That changed in the spring of 1987 when the pile at his gate was too large to ignore and the farm income was too small to pretend everything was fine. He sat at his kitchen table one evening in April and did an accounting that he had been avoiding. The farm was carrying $180,000 in operating debt. Corn was at $163 a bushel.

He had 340 acres, a shop full of tools, and a pile of walnut outside that had been appraised in his own head at somewhere between worthless and considerable, depending on what you did with it. He decided to find out what it was worth. Let me tell you about the decision Emmett made that spring, because it was not the decision a sensible man would make, and it was not the decision a reckless man would make either.

It was the decision of a man who had spent 13 years learning something specific, and who had finally reached the point where the learning and the necessity arrived at the same moment. He wrote 12 letters. He sent them to gun shops, to sporting goods dealers, to custom rifle builders, and to two of the names he’d found in a gun magazine’s directory of custom stock makers.

He included photographs, actual photographs taken with a 35 mm camera and developed at the drugstore in Columbus of four of his best stocks. He described the wood, described his process, described his source. He priced the stocks at $185 each, which was less than half what the Oregon stock maker was charging and which EMTT had calculated incorrectly, as it turned out, would be competitive.

Eight of the 12 letters were not answered. Two came back with polite rejections. One came back with a question about lead time. One came back with an order for six stocks and a check for $1,110. That was from a man named Douglas Prescott, who ran a custom rifle shop in Scottsdale, Arizona, and who had been looking for a reliable walnut source for 3 years. Prescott’s letter was short.

It said, “Send me six of your best pieces, same dimensions as the sample photos. I’ll have them fitted and call you with feedback. If the fit is what it looks like in the photos, I’ll want more. EMTT built those six stocks in 41 days. He worked them in the evenings after the farm work was done and on the three rainy days in May when he couldn’t be in the fields.

He was more careful with those six stocks than he had been with anything he’d made before, because he understood that Prescott’s feedback would tell him something true about whether what he was doing was actually as good as he thought it was, or whether 13 years of working in isolation had given him a distorted sense of his own skill.

The feedback came 3 weeks after he shipped them. Prescott called on a Thursday evening. He said the fit was excellent, the figure was exceptional, and that one of the six had a grain orientation he wouldn’t use on a rifle that was going to see hard use. But the other five were the best production grade custom stocks he’d seen from a domestic source in 10 years.

He said he’d take 12 more and he wanted to talk about pricing because $185 was too low and he didn’t want his supplier going out of business. EMTT stood in his kitchen holding the phone and did not say anything for a moment. Then he said, “What do you think they’re worth?” Prescott said, “What I’m charging my customers for a rifle with your wood on it.

The stock is contributing at least $350 to the value. I’ll pay you $275 each and I want to write a first refusal on your production. That was June of 1987. EMTT Holloway shook hands over the telephone with a man in Arizona and became at the age of 51 a guntock manufacturer. Now, let me pause here and ask you something because you might be wondering why a man who had been making gun stocks for 13 years was pricing them at $185 when the market would bear $275.

And the answer is what happens when you learn something in isolation. EMTT had no reference point for what his work was worth, except the three stocks he’d sold to neighbors for prices that felt fair at the time. He had the technical knowledge and none of the market knowledge. What Prescott gave him in that phone call was not just a better price. It was a calibration.

It was the first time someone with actual market knowledge had told him what the thing he’d built was worth and it shifted something in his understanding of what he was doing. He went out to the shop that night and stood in the dark for a while. Then he turned on the lights and started thinking about how to build 12 more in the time he had.

Let me tell you about the operation EMTT built over the next four years. because it did not look like a manufacturing operation and it did not behave like one either. He was still farming. He was still getting walnut offcuts from the casket works every 6 to 8 weeks. Loads that range from a quarter cord to two cords dependent on what the consolidated yard had accumulated.

He was still working evenings and rainy days and winter months when the farm didn’t need him. But the volume was increasing. The price was increasing and something else was happening that EMTT hadn’t anticipated. Word was spreading. By 1989, he had four regular customers. Prescott in Arizona was still the largest, taking 12 to 18 stocks a year.

A custom rifle builder in Bosezeman, Montana named Terren Gallagher had found him through Prescott and was ordering 8 to 10 a year. A gun shop in Kansas City was selling his stocks as blanks to customers who wanted to do their own fitting. And a man in Pennsylvania named Hartwell, first named Bernard, though everyone called him Bud, was buying five or six a year for a small batch of bespoke rifles he made for wealthy clients who wanted American walnut that looked like European walnut, meaning figured, deep, with the kind of color variation that comes from wood

that was dried slowly and worked by someone who understood it. The prices had moved. By 1989, EMTT was getting $340 for a standard stock blank and $475 for exhibition grade pieces with exceptional figure. His income from stocks that year was $23,400. His farm income that year was $14,200. The math had shifted.

He did not stop farming, but he started thinking about the shop differently. Let me tell you about the problem that arrived in 1990. Because every story about a man building something has a moment when the thing he’s building is threatened. And Emtts came in the form of a phone call from Harold Severt at the consolidated casket works.

Sever told him that the casket works had been purchased by a regional manufacturing group out of Omaha and that the new owners had contracted with a hardwood dealer in Missouri to take all their wastewood on a commercial basis. The offcuts would no longer be available. The last delivery would be in August. EMTT thanked him and hung up and sat at his kitchen table for a long time.

He had at that moment approximately three cords of walnut in various stages of drying in his shop and barn. He had four customers who were depending on a consistent supply. He had built a pricing structure and a reputation around a specific type of wood, plat county walnut, figured off cuts from a single regional source, and the source was about to disappear.

He did not panic. He thought about it for 2 days and then he started making calls. What he found when he started calling was that the casket works had not been his only option. It had been his first option, the one that had come to him without effort, and he had never looked past it because he hadn’t needed to.

But Nebraska and the surrounding states had furniture manufacturers, mill workshops, stair builders, and flooring companies that were all generating walnut offcuts they didn’t know what to do with. He spent 3 weeks on the phone and in his truck driving to shops within 150 mi of Platt County, and what he found was not one source, but 11.

None of them were as large as the casket works had been. Together they were larger. By October of 1990, 2 months after the last consolidated delivery, EMTT had established relationships with seven walnut generating shops and had a supply pipeline that was more reliable and more diverse than what he’d had before. The wood was different.

Some of it was from furniture operations and had different drawing histories, different dimensions, different figure characteristics, and he had to learn each source the way he’d learned the casket works would, which took time and cost him some ruined blanks. But by 1991, he had it figured out, and the supply was stable. He also during those three weeks of driving and calling discovered something he hadn’t expected.

The shops he visited had been generating walnut offcuts for years and had been burning them or paying to have them hauled away because nobody had ever told them the wood had value. When EMTT explained what he was doing with it, several of them asked if he’d pay for the wood rather than take it free.

He said yes and named a price that was low enough to keep his margins intact, but high enough that the shops felt they were getting something real. Two of them said that was fine. Five of them said they’d rather give it to him free than deal with the paperwork of a commercial transaction as long as he kept coming to get it.

He kept coming to get it. Let me tell you about the year 1993 because that was the year that a man named Rick Thornton entered this story and tried to change its direction. Thornton was the regional sales manager for a large firearms accessories company based in Minneapolis and he had heard about EMTT through Bud Hartwell in Pennsylvania who had mentioned to a colleague that he was getting exceptional walnut from a farmer in Nebraska.

Thornton called EMTT in February of 1993 and introduced himself and said he represented a company that was looking for a domestic walnut supplier for a new line of premium replacement stocks they were planning to launch. He said the volume would be significant. He used the phrase several hundred units annually and that the pricing would be competitive.

He asked if EMTT would be interested in discussing an exclusive supply arrangement. EMTT said he’d listen. Thornton drove to Platt County in March. He was younger than EMTT by about 20 years, wore a company jacket with an embroidered logo, drove a company truck with a company logo on the door. He walked through EMTT’s shop with the manner of a man who was used to evaluating operations and finding them wanting.

He picked up stocks, turned them over, examined the grain, set them down. He asked questions about production capacity, about drying times, about dimensional consistency. He used the word scalable three times in the first hour. Then he told EMTT what the arrangement would look like. The company would take exclusive rights to EMTT’s production.

They would set the specifications, dimensions, grade standards, finish requirements. They would pay $210 per unit for standard grade, $290 for premium. They wanted a minimum of 300 units per year with capacity to scale to 600. EMTT looked at him. He said, “I’m getting $340 for standard and $475 for premium right now.

” Thornon said, “Yes, but you’re selling to four customers in small batches. We’re offering you volume and stability.” He said the per unit price was lower, but the total revenue would be higher, and that the company’s marketing would build the brand in ways that EMTT couldn’t do on his own. EMTT said he’d think about it. He thought about it for a week.

He called Prescott in Arizona and Gallagher in Montana and told them what had been offered. Prescott said, “Don’t do it.” He said, “You know what happens when a small supplier signs an exclusive with a large buyer? The large buyer controls the price from that point forward. you’ll be at $210 forever and you’ll have built their brand, not yours.

Gallagher said something similar. He said, “Your wood has a reputation because you control it. The minute you hand that control to someone else, the reputation belongs to them.” Emmett called Thornon and declined the offer. Thornton said he was making a mistake, that the custom market was too small to sustain what EMTT was trying to build, that without volume, he’d always be a cottage operation.

He said it with the particular confidence of a man who has access to market research and assumes that market research is the same as wisdom. EMTT thanked him for the visit and hung up. Let me tell you about what happened to Rick Thornton’s company over the next 6 years because the story deserves it. The premium replacement stock line launched in 1994 with wood sourced from a commercial walnut supplier in Missouri.

The stocks were competent. They were consistent. They were by every measurable production standard adequate. They were also, to anyone who had seen EMTT’s work, clearly inferior. The wood was lower figure. The color was flatter. The grain was straighter in the way that production would is always straighter, which is to say duller.

The line sold moderately well for 2 years and then stalled because the custom rifle market that Thornton had described as too small to sustain was in fact exactly the right size for what it was. a market where the buyers knew wood and would pay for exceptional wood and would not pay premium prices for ordinary wood in a premium package.

The line was quietly discontinued in 1998. Thornton called EMTT in 1999. He was no longer with the Minneapolis company. He had started his own accessories business and was looking for a walnut supplier. He said he’d been wrong about the exclusive arrangement and that he understood now what EMTT had been building.

He asked if EMTT would sell him stocks at current market price. EMTT said yes. He said, “I’ll sell to anyone who pays the price and respects the lead time.” He said, “The price is $520 for standard and $750 for exhibition grade.” There was a silence on the other end of the line. Then Thornton said, “That’s a significant increase from 1993.

” EMTT said, “Yes, it is.” He said, “The market research you brought with you in 1993 said the custom market was too small. I stayed in it anyway. This is what too small looks like now.” Thornon placed an order for 20 stocks. Now, let me tell you about the wood itself. Because you can’t tell this story honestly without talking about what made EMTT stocks different.

And that means talking about black walnut in a way that most people never have occasion to think about. Black walnut, juglans [ __ ] native to the eastern and central United States, is the traditional American guntock wood. It has been used for rifle stocks since the flint lock era because it has a combination of properties that no other domestic wood matches exactly.

It is hard enough to resist denting, light enough not to add unnecessary weight to a rifle, dimensionally stable enough that it doesn’t move significantly with humidity changes, and it takes checkering. the hand cut cross-hatch grip pattern on the pistol grip and forstock better than almost any other wood.

It also when it comes from old growth or second growth trees that grew slowly in competition with other trees develops a figure a grain pattern that ranges from straight and plain to wildly curled and swirled in ways that make each piece unique. The figure is not random. It is the result of specific growing conditions. The angle of the hillside, the competition from neighboring trees, the stress patterns from wind loading over decades, the way the tree responded to injury or disease early in its life.

A walnut tree that grew in the open with plenty of light and no competition tends to produce straight grained plain wood. A walnut tree that grew in a hedge or a woodland edge, competing for light, responding to stress, bending, and recovering over a century of growth, tends to produce figured wood. The casket works had been rejecting figured wood for 60 years because figure is structurally unpredictable in thin production panels.

what they’d been throwing away was, from a stock makaker’s perspective, the best wood in the pile. EMTT understood this by about 1979, 5 years into his education with the offcuts. He began selecting and segregating his stock differently, setting aside the most highly figured pieces for longer drying times. He was air drying everything in his barn, which in Nebraska’s climate meant a minimum of 2 years per inch of thickness, and working them only after he was confident they had stabilized.

He learned to read the end grain of a piece of walnut the way a doctor reads an X-ray. Looking for the density rings that indicated slow growth, the medullery rays that indicated stability, the grain runout that indicated where the wood would be strong and where it would want to split. He developed a grading system for his own use that had four categories.

and he kept a ledger in which he recorded the source, the dimensions, the figure grade, the drying date, and the eventual disposition of every significant piece of wood that came through his shop. That ledger by 1995 covered three volumes and documented over 2,000 individual pieces of walnut. Let me tell you about 1995 because that was the year EMTT’s operation crossed a threshold he hadn’t planned for.

His four original customers had become nine. His annual production had reached $180 stocks. His revenue from stocks was $74,000. And the farm, which he was still operating, though at reduced scale, having rented out 180 acres to a neighbor, was generating another $22,000. He had hired one part-time helper, a young man named Caleb Sorenson, who was 19 years old, had grown up on a farm 2 mi away, and had shown up one afternoon asking if EMTT needed help in the shop.

EMTT had said he’d try him for a month. Caleb was still there 3 years later, working 3 days a week and learning the wood with the same methodical patience that EMTT had brought to it in 1974. The threshold EMTT crossed in 1995 was not financial. It was reputational. That year, a writer for a national gun magazine visited Platt County and spent two days in EMTT’s shop and wrote a piece that ran in the October issue under the title The Nebraska Stockmaker.

The piece described EMTT’s source material, his process, his grading system, and his customers. It included photographs of six of his stocks, including two exhibition grade pieces with figure so dramatic that several readers wrote to the magazine saying the photos had to be enhanced. They weren’t. The piece described EMTT’s prices, which at that point ranged from $420 to $680, and noted that his lead time was running 8 months.

The mail that arrived after that article ran was the largest volume of correspondence EMTT had received in his life. He counted 147 letters and postcards in the 6 weeks after publication. He answered every one of them by hand, which took most of November. of the 147, he converted 23 into orders, which extended his lead time to 14 months and required him to call Caleb and ask if he could come in 5 days a week.

Caleb said yes. Let me tell you about the question of authenticity because it became central to what EMTT was building in ways he hadn’t anticipated. When the magazine article ran, it described his wood as coming from regional Nebraska walnut sources, which was accurate but incomplete. What it didn’t fully convey was the specific character of the supply chain.

The fact that EMTT was working wood that had been rejected by other industries, wood that had been considered waste, wood that had value specifically because of its irregularity. When customers started calling after the article, several of them asked whether he could source specific figure types. More curl, more crotch figure, more of the dramatic swirling grain that was visible in the photographs.

He told them he couldn’t. He told them that each piece was what it was, that the figure was a product of the tree’s history and not something that could be specified in advance, and that part of what he was selling was the uncertainty. The fact that you ordered a stock from him knowing it would be exceptional, but not knowing exactly how it would be exceptional until it arrived.

Some customers didn’t like that answer. They wanted to know what they were getting before they paid for it. EMTT told those customers that he wasn’t the right source for them, and he said it without apology. He had learned by 1995 that the customers who understood what he was selling were the customers worth having and that the customers who wanted to specify the figure in advance were customers who didn’t understand wood well enough to appreciate what they were buying. He wasn’t rude about it.

He was clear that clarity was part of the brand. Though EMTT would not have used the word brand, he would have said it was just how he did business. Let me tell you about the conversation EMTT had with his son Gerald in the spring of 1997 because it was the conversation that determined what the operation would become.

Gerald was 34 years old, had gone to the University of Nebraska, had worked for 10 years in agricultural equipment sales in Omaha, and had been watching his father’s shop operation grow with a mixture of admiration and frustration. The frustration was about scale. Gerald had done his own accounting and had concluded that the operation was leaving money on the table.

That with better marketing, a real website, a catalog, and a systematic approach to customer acquisition, EMTT could be doing $300,000 or $400,000 a year instead of the $110,000 he’d done in 1996. He drove out to Platt County on a Saturday in April and made his case at the kitchen table. He had a folder with him.

He had printed out information about comparable custom wood suppliers, about pricing structures, about the emerging internet marketplace for custom gun components. He laid it all out and said, “Dad, you’re running a hobby operation with hobby margins. You could be running a real business. EMTT listened to all of it. He looked at the folder. He was quiet for a while.

Then he said, “What do you think I’m building here?” Gerald said, “That’s what I’m asking.” EMTT said, “I’m building something that lasts.” He said, “I’ve got customers who’ve been buying from me for 10 years. I’ve got wood that nobody else has. I’ve got a young man in the shop who’s going to understand this wood the way I understand it in about five more years.

He said, “If I triple the volume, I have to triple the wood supply. And if I triple the wood supply, I’m buying from commercial sources. And if I’m buying from commercial sources, I’m making a different product.” He said, “The product I make is made from wood that nobody else wanted. That’s not a limitation. That’s the whole thing. Gerald looked at him for a moment.

Then he said, “You could do $500,000 a year without tripling the volume if you raised your prices and built the brand properly.” EMTT said, “What do you mean by properly?” Gerald said, “A name, a mark, something people can look for. right now you’re EMTT Holloway in Plat County, Nebraska. You could be something people look for specifically.

EMTT thought about that for 2 weeks. He called Prescott in Arizona who by 1997 had been his customer for 10 years and had sold by his own estimate over 200 rifles with EMTT stocks on them. He asked Prescott what he told customers about the wood. Prescott said, “I tell them it’s Holloway Walnut.” He said, “I’ve been telling customers that for years.

Some of them ask where it comes from, and I tell them Nebraska, and they ask if they can order directly from you.” EMTT said, “What do you tell them?” Prescott said, “I tell them your lead time is a year and your prices are worth it.” EMTT called Gerald back and said, “All right, let’s build the name.” Let me tell you about what Holloway Walnut became between 1997 and 2003.

Because the building of it was not dramatic, and it was not fast, and both of those things were intentional. Gerald came out to Platt County on weekends for the first year and helped EMTT build a simple catalog, not a glossy magazine, just a wellphotographed eight-page document describing the operation, the wood, the grading system, the pricing, and the lead time.

They had 500 of them printed. Gerald took them to gun shows in Omaha and Kansas City and Denver and handed them to custom rifle builders and gun shop owners. He did not have a sales pitch. He showed people the catalog and let them look at the photographs and answered questions. The catalog had EMTT’s phone number and a post office box address.

It did not have a website because Gerald had argued for one and EMTT had said he wasn’t ready to manage what a website would bring in. The catalog generated 47 new inquiries in its first year. Of those, 19 converted to orders. Lead time went to 16 months. In 1999, they built the website. It was simple.

five pages, the same photographs as the catalog, the same information, a contact form. Gerald had argued for an online ordering system, and EMTT had said, “No, every order goes through a phone call first because I need to know who I’m selling to and what they’re building.” Gerald had thought this was eccentric. He came to understand over the following years that it was the reason the customers who ordered from EMTT were the right customers.

People who had enough patience to make a phone call, enough knowledge to have a real conversation about wood, enough commitment to wait 16 months for what they’d ordered. The website generated 200 inquiries in its first year. Lead time went to 22 months. By 2001, EMTT Holloway was 65 years old, had stopped farming entirely, had sold 240 acres, and retained 100, which he rented to his neighbor, and was running a gunstock operation that employed Caleb Sorenson full-time, and two part-time helpers, generated $340,000

in annual revenue, and had a customer list of 87 active accounts in 23 3 states. The wood was still coming from regional shops. The network he’d built after the casket works closed had grown to 14 sources, and he’d added three walnut buyers who knew to call him when unusual material came through. The lead time was running 24 months.

He was, by any reasonable measure, exactly what Gerald had said he could be. He was not by any reasonable measure what Rick Thornton had told him he could never be. Let me tell you about the last delivery from the consolidated casket works because it came after the casket works itself was gone. The manufacturing group that had bought the works in 1990 had run it for 8 years and then closed it in 1998, consolidating production to a facility in Iowa.

The building sat empty for 3 years. In 2001, it was a purchased by a developer and converted to commercial space. During the demolition of the old lumber storage building on the property, the contractor found a quantity of walnut slabs that had been stored in the rafters, pieces that had been there since before the 1990 sale, drystacked and forgotten.

some of them dating back to the 1970s based on the way they’d been cut. The contractor called the County Historical Society who called a local newspaper who called EMTT because the article about the casket works mentioned that he’d been receiving their offcuts for years. EMTT drove to the site and looked at the wood.

There were 43 pieces ranging from 2 feet to 6 ft in length. some of them 30 years old based on the oxidation of the cut surfaces. He stood in the rubble of the old storage building holding a piece of walnut that he recognized. Not the specific piece, but the character of it, the figure, the color, the weight, as the same wood he’d been working since 1974.

He bought all 43 pieces from the contractor for $400, loaded them in his truck, and drove them back to Plat County. He worked those pieces over the next four years, slowly, one or two at a time, setting aside the best figure for what he called his reserve stock. Pieces he wasn’t going to sell until he understood exactly what they deserved to become.

The last piece from that load, a slab with a crotch figure so complex and dramatic that he’d been reluctant to cut into it, he worked in the spring of 2005. He made it into a single rifle stock that he never sold. It hung on the wall of his shop, finished in oil, and every customer who visited the shop asked about it, and he told them it wasn’t for sale.

Let me tell you about the accountant that Gerald ran in the spring of 2003 because it was the number that gave this story its final shape. Gerald had been keeping books for the operation since 1997. And in the spring of 2003, he sat down and calculated the cumulative revenue from the operation since 1987 when Prescott had sent the first check.

The number from 1987 through the end of 2002 was 1,240,000. He also calculated the value of the current order backlog, the orders on the books at current pricing waiting to be filled, which was $380,000. He showed EMTT the numbers at the kitchen table. EMTT looked at them for a while.

He said, “That doesn’t count the ones I gave away.” Gerald said, “No, it doesn’t.” EMTT said, “Add those in at current prices. What do you get?” Gerald did the math. He said, “Probably another $60,000 to $80,000 at today’s prices.” Emmett nodded. He said, “So about a million and a half total from wood that was free.

” Gerald said, “The wood wasn’t free. You paid with your time.” EMTT said, “I was going to spend the time anyway.” That’s the thing about wood. It doesn’t care how long you take. Let me tell you about Caleb Sorenson in 2003. because by that point Caleb was 27 years old and had been working in EMTT’s shop for 9 years and the question of what happened to the operation after EMTT was no longer a distant question.

EMTT was 67. He had no health problems that he acknowledged, but he had the pragmatic relationship with mortality that men of his generation developed after a certain age, which meant he had started thinking about continuity in the way that farmers always think about it, not as an abstraction, but as a practical problem to be solved while there was still time to solve it.

He offered Caleb a partnership in 1999. Caleb had accepted it and had been building his equity stake through a combination of reduced wages and direct investment over four years. By 2003, Caleb owned 30% of the operation. EMTT had told him that the path to majority ownership was there if he wanted it, and that the only condition was that the wood sourcing stayed regional and the production stayed at a pace that the wood could support.

He said, “I built this from wood nobody wanted. Don’t let it become something that needs wood everybody wants.” Caleb said he understood. He did understand. He had learned walnut from EMTT the way EMTT had learned it from the wood itself. Slowly through repetition, through failure, through the specific education that comes from working the same material in the same place for years, by 2003, Caleb could read a piece of walnut almost as well as EMTT could.

He had his own opinions about figure grades and drying times that sometimes differed from EMTTs. And EMTT listened to those opinions and sometimes changed his mind, which was a thing that Caleb would later say meant more to him than any other part of the apprenticeship. The operation they ran together between 1999 and 2006 was the most productive period in Holloway Walnut’s history.

They were producing 240 to 280 stocks per year at prices ranging from $580 to $1,100 for exhibition grade. Annual revenue in 2005 was $218,000. The customer list had grown to 140 accounts. The lead time had stabilized at 18 months, which EMTT had decided was the right lead time. Long enough to discourage casual buyers.

Short enough to keep serious customers from going elsewhere. Let me tell you about the conversation that happened at the Plat County Co-op in the fall of 2004 because it was the last time anyone in that county said anything dismissive about what EMTT Holloway was doing. And it is worth telling in full. There was a man named Wade Crowley who ran a farm equipment dealership in Columbus and who had been for 20 years the kind of man who held court at the co-op counter and offered opinions on everything.

He was not malicious. He was the product of a culture that equated scale with legitimacy. And EMTT’s operation, a man in a farm shop, making things one at a time, had always struck him as the kind of hobby that a man with too much time and not enough sense pursued instead of doing something real. Crowley said in front of four other men at the co-op counter that he’d heard EMTT was charging over $1,000 for a piece of wood.

He said it with the tone of a man reporting an absurdity. He said, “Who pays $1,000 for a rifle stock from a barn in Platt County?” One of the other men said, “I heard he’s got a 2-year waiting list.” Crowley said, “For a piece of wood.” He laughed. It was not a mean laugh. It was the laugh of a man who genuinely cannot imagine that what he’s hearing is true.

EMTT was at the other end of the counter getting his mail from the postmaster’s window. He had heard all of it. He walked over with his mail under his arm and said, “Wade, I’ll tell you who pays $1,000.” He said, “Last month, I shipped a stock to a man in Colorado who builds rifles for elk guides.

” He said, “The rifle that stock is going on will sell for $14,000, and the man who buys it will use it for 20 years, and his son will use it after him.” He said the stock is the part of that rifle that the man touches every time he picks it up. He said $1,000 for the part of a $14,000 tool that you handle every day for 20 years is not expensive.

It is the opposite of expensive. Crowley didn’t say anything. EMTT picked up his mail and left. The four other men at the counter were quiet for a moment. Then one of them said, “I didn’t know he was doing that kind of volume.” Another one said, “He’s been doing it since before any of us knew what he was doing.” That was true.

That had always been true. Let me tell you about the last years because they were good years and they deserved to be told as good years. EMTT Holloway worked in his shop until he was 74. He slowed down gradually. Fewer stocks per year from him personally, more from Caleb and the two part-time helpers. But he never fully stopped.

He was in the shop every day looking at wood, making decisions about grading and drying and what a particular piece deserved to become. He had become by the time he was in his early 70s the kind of authority that people drove to visit. Custom stock makers from other states came to Plat County to look at his wood and talk about it.

A professor from the University of Nebraska’s forestry program came twice and wrote a paper about the provenence and characteristics of Plat County walnut that cited EMTT’s ledgers. those three volumes documenting over 2,000 pieces of wood as primary source material. He died in February of 2009 at the age of 73 of a heart attack that he had in the shop on a Tuesday morning.

Caleb found him. The shop was warm and the lights were on and there was a piece of walnut on the workbench that EMTT had been examined at. A piece with a figure so complex and deep that Caleb stood there for a long time looking at it before he called anyone because it was the kind of piece that EMTT would have wanted someone to look at properly before the day moved on.

The funeral was in Columbus. Gerald spoke, Caleb spoke. Douglas Prescott drove from Scottsdale, Arizona, which nobody had expected. He stood up and said that in 30 years of building custom rifles, he had worked with Walnut from six countries and 11 domestic suppliers, and that EMTT Holloway’s wood was the only wood he’d ever used that made customers call him specifically to ask what was on their rifle.

He said they’d ask about the wood before they asked about the action or the barrel. He said that’s what EMTT built. He built wood that people noticed. Let me tell you about what Holloway Walnut is today. Because the story doesn’t end in 2009. Caleb Sorenson bought the remaining 70% of the operation from EMTT’s estate in 2009 at a price that Gerald and EMTT had agreed on years earlier and that Caleb had been working toward since 1999.

He runs it from the same shop. He has three full-time employees now, including a young woman named Ingred Raasmuson, who came to him in 2017 with a forestry degree from Iowa State and a specific interest in walnut providence, and who has spent the last 6 years learning the wood the way Caleb learned it, which is the way EMTT learned it, which is slowly and by hand.

and through the particular education that comes from working the same material in the same place for a long time. The wood still comes from regional sources. The network EMTT built after the casket works closed and then rebuilt after the casket works was sold has been maintained and expanded. Caleb has 14 active supply relationships with furniture shops, mill work operations, and specialty lumber dealers within 200 miles of Platt County.

None of them are the casket works. All of them are generating wood that would otherwise be burned or chipped, wood that has figure and character, and the specific history of trees that grew under stress in the river valleys and hedge of the central plains. The prices today start at $1,200 for a standard blank and reach $2,400 for exhibition grade.

The lead time is 20 months. The customer list has $160 active accounts. Annual revenue in the last full year was $510,000. EMTT’s ledgers are in a filing cabinet in the shop. Ingred has been digitizing them, entering each entry into a database that will eventually allow her to cross-reference figure grades with source locations and drawing histories in ways that EMTT did in his head.

She showed Caleb the database last spring and he looked at it for a long time and said he would have liked this. She said, “I know.” He said he would have also said it was unnecessary because he already knew all of it. She said, “I know that, too. The stock that Emmett made from the last piece of the casket works wood.

The one with the crotch figure so complex he’d been reluctant to cut into it still hangs on the wall of the shop. Every customer who visits asks about it. Caleb tells them it’s not for sale. Some of them ask why.” He says, “Because some things you keep to remember what you’re trying to do.” He says, “EMTT kept it to remind himself what the wood could be when you let it be what it was.

” He says, “I keep it for the same reason.” There is a photograph on the wall next to it. It’s a black and white photograph taken sometime in the late 1980s of a man standing in a shop in front of a workbench covered in walnut slabs. He’s wearing a canvas jacket and a seed cap. And he’s holding a piece of walnut up to the light from a window, turning it slowly, looking at the grain, the way a man looks at something he is trying to understand.

He looks like a farmer. He looks like a man who fixes things. He looks like a man who has found something in a pile of wastewood and is in the process of deciding what it deserves to become. In 1987, a casket factory in Columbus, Nebraska, decided that figured walnut was not worth keeping.

A farmer in Platt County disagreed. He disagreed quietly in a shop behind his house for 16 years before anyone outside his county knew his name. He disagreed with a draw knife and a band saw and a lathe and three volumes of handwritten notes and a patience that the people who laughed at him did not have and could not have bought.

He built from wood that was considered waste a half million dollar operation that outlasted the company that threw the wood away, outlasted the company that tried to buy him out and is still running today from the same shop with the same sourcing philosophy and the same 20-month wait for wood that people drive across the country to hold in their hands.

The casket works as a storage unit now. Holloway Walnut is still making stocks. That’s what happens when a man sees treasure where everyone else sees.