single traffic light.
You’ll see couples wandering in and out of the art galleries, small kids licking icecream cones, and groups of
millennials up for the weekend from New York City rolling in for brunch. And if you stand there long
enough this summer, you’ll likely see some confused tourists rock up and ask for directions to “where the
festival was held”. They won’t be the first to be told it’s about 50 miles that-a-way.
Growing up in Woodstock, I had to deliver the same news more than once. This August is the 50th
anniversary of the most famous music festival in the world, but like the original 1969 concert, the official
celebrations won’t come within miles of the Catskill Mountains town it’s named after. Fans will congregate
in Bethel Woods, near Max Yasgur’s farm, to see some of the big acts of the 1960s such as Santana and John
Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival (both played those muddy fields 50 years ago), as well as Ringo
Starr and his All Starr Band, while the town will carry on in its own fashion, business as always.
But while Woodstock the town and Woodstock the festival are forever entwined in the public
consciousness, the town’s appeal and bohemian reputation isn’t derived from the festival. In fact, it’s the
reason why the concert was meant to be held there in the first place.
Woodstock back in 1970. The festival
celebrates its 50th anniversary this year (Rex)Founded by the Dutch, carved out of the Great Hardenbergh patent purchased from local Indian tribes, and
then English settlers, the town was incorporated in 1787. By the late 19th century, Woodstock, a farming
community punctuated with lumber mills and tanneries, began attracting visitors because of its bucolic
location less than 100 miles north of New York City in the Catskill Mountains. (For a comprehensive
history there’s the 700-page tome, Woodstock: History of an American Town, by longtime Woodstock
historian Alf Evers.) First coming up the Hudson River by steamboat and then by rail, New Yorkers of
means flocked to the grand hotels built on mountain tops, most of which have long since burnt down.
“Local people realised they could make money from what people saw in the land and the fresh mountain
air,” says Richard Heppner, today’s town historian. “The original mountain houses were built for people
coming up from the city to escape the heat and humidity in the summer and avoid diseases like
tuberculosis.”
But it was the utopian vision of one Englishman, Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead and his American wife, Jane
Byrd McCall, that laid the foundation for Woodstock’s avant garde reputation over a century ago. The
wealthy heir of a Yorkshire textile mill family, Whitehead entered Balliol College, Oxford, where he
absorbed the social reformist philosophy of John Ruskin and the aesthetics of William Morris. The couple
eventually found themselves in America looking to found an artists’ colony. In 1902, they bought 1,500
acres on the mountain above Woodstock, attracted by the Catskills’ wealth of natural beauty and access to
New York City. The Byrdcliffe Art Colony was born.