Fans gather for the festival on Max Yasgur's
farm in Bethel, New York (Getty)She says at first she didn’t like Woodstock, she didn’t want to live in the middle of nowhere, knowing no
one, but “the woods have made me submit. They tie me down at night and force me to see reason.” Gaiman
and Palmer moved here more permanently a few years ago with their son, Ash. She composes at nearby
studios and occasionally performs at local venues, while Gaiman has a writing cabin on their property. The
town’s appeal is “the proximity to nature with proximity to the city”, Palmer says. “And the art colony set
the stage. You only need a little bit of art in the water to freak a place out forever – artists can smell other
artists.”
It was this special reputation as a certain kind of cultural-rural paradise that drew my family here in the late
1970s from Brooklyn, along with a host of others looking for alternative lifestyles and health food stores,
from former hippies to Buddhist monks. As a child, I roamed the woods, eating handfuls of wild
blackberries and following mountain streams up bosky slopes. Growing up in a town like Woodstock, my
name didn’t single me out at school; although it did make me stand out, as I discovered in the course of
researching this piece, when I found myself referred to in this 198 7 New York Times article about
Woodstock. That was weird.
I also spent an inordinate amount of time in that haven for bookish children everywhere, the town library.
In the 1920s, as the artists settled into the town permanently, they became involved in the town and created
civic institutions. Members of the Woodstock Artists Association donated art books and raffled off artworks
to raise money to launch what is now one of Woodstock’s most beloved and argued over institutions, the
Woodstock Public Library. A few years ago, the library revealed another Oxfordshire, this time to the town
of Woodstock, England.
After bushes were cleared away from the front of the library, a golden stone was revealed, the limestone
standing out from the local bluestone slate like the sun peeping through grey clouds. The inscription reads:
1787—1937
To Woodstock, New York
In Kindred Sympathy and peaceful association
This Stone from Blenheim Palace
Is dedicated
By
Woodstock, England