In the year of the Coronation of
HM King George VIFortunately there is an exhaustive and strangely compelling history of the library, The Story of a Small
Town Library, which reveals that in the spring of 1937, the wife of sculptor Bruno Zimm (he was president
of the library at the time) wrote to the mayor of Woodstock, in England, informing him of Woodstock’s
upcoming sesquicentennial. The swift response came that the town would send a stone for Woodstock,
New York’s war memorial. A check of the Archives at Blenheim Palace turned up no information, but the
Oxfordshire History Centre found minutes from a quarterly meeting of the Borough Council stating that
“His Grace the Duke of Marlborough has kindly given a stone from Blenheim Palace to be built into the
War Memorial at Woodstock USA.”
Is now a good time to let the good people of Woodstock, England, and the 12th Duke know that this
mysterious war memorial was not built and eventually the stone was placed in an unused fireplace in the
library for a decade because no one could figure out what to do with it? However, in 1948, it was used as a
cornerstone for a new library extension and then moved to its present position when another wing was
added 20 years later.
The fireflies winking in and out at dusk and the inky black sky full of stardust remain as magical as ever
Today, Woodstock is going through its next metamorphosis. Just as Woodstock once absorbed the artists
and then the hippies, now the town is adapting to a permanent influx of temporary visitors brought by
Airbnb. The town’s zoning laws have long kept out hotel development, which meant that visitors either
rented a house for the summer or booked a room at of the few B&Bs or motels near town.
But with Airbnb, renting a small cabin or a five-bedroom house with a pool is as easy as scrolling (if you
search for Woodstock, NY more than 300 rentals come up). The technology that allows someone to post
their manbun on Instagram, along with their GPS so their friends can find them, while booking three nights
in a house, coincided with the rise of the “maker” culture, farm-to-fork dining, and handcrafted goods that
Ralph Whitehead surely would have appreciated.
Local businesses gladly play on the nostalgia of
the music festival, 50 miles away (Getty)You can’t find this as easily in the Hamptons as you can in the Catskills. These visitors want to sit around
the firepit outside their cabin in the woods, not around a table at a nightclub, but they still want to go out for