The words of Max Yasgur, on whose farm the Woodstock Festival took place during three steamy August days during the summer of 1969, delighted the hundreds of thousands of young people who had gathered on his meadows to hear the legendary rock and folk music artists of the era. "I'm a farmer. I don't know how to speak to twenty people at one time, let alone a crowd like this..." reveals a different aspect to the festival, and its later reincarnation into the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, that is now explored by the new exhibit being assembled at the Sullivan County Museum. The land on which the stage was erected was cleared by early Scottish immigrants nearly a century and a half earlier. This exhibit will follow this, and subsequent, families whose own stories preceeded that of Yasgur.
After the concert, the site, considered hallowed ground to some and a nemisies by others, became embroiled in a political struggle that for decades would pit neighbor against neighbor, generation against generation, until its preservation came in the present form, the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts. Though this exhibit is still in the process of being created, it is open to the public during the museum's normal operating hours.
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