This Day in American History: Woodstock Opens
- ForAmerica
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
On this day in 1969, half a million young people descended on a dairy farm in upstate New York for a concert that was supposed to draw a fraction of that crowd -- and ended up defining an entire generation.
Four young, relatively inexperienced promoters -- John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, Artie Kornfeld, and Michael Lang -- set out to raise money for a recording studio near Woodstock, New York, the longtime artists' colony where Bob Dylan lived. The concert idea grew far beyond that original plan, but both the town of Woodstock and their first backup venue in nearby Wallkill got cold feet and backed out. With the festival barely a month away and no site secured, 49-year-old dairy farmer Max Yasgur stepped in, offering up part of his 600-acre farm in Bethel, New York, for the event.
The Woodstock Music and Art Fair, billed as "An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace and Music," opened on August 15, 1969. Organizers had planned for a crowd in the tens of thousands; somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000 people showed up instead, turning the New York State Thruway into a parking lot and forcing organizers to make the show free rather than try to collect tickets from a sea of humanity that had overwhelmed every fence and gate. The scheduled opening act, Sweetwater, got stuck in that traffic, so folk singer Richie Havens ended up opening the festival instead, largely by accident.
Over three rain-soaked, mud-caked days -- stretching into a fourth -- Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Who, Sly and the Family Stone, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Grateful Dead, and dozens of other acts played to a crowd that had turned Yasgur's farmland into a temporary city roughly the size of Miami. National Guard helicopters flew in food and medical supplies. On the festival's final day, Yasgur himself took the stage to address the crowd, telling them, "You've proven something to the world... that a half a million kids can get together and have three days of fun and music and have nothing but fun and music, and God bless you for it."
The festival grounds became a documented mess afterward, and some neighbors sued over the damage and litter left behind -- but within months, the mud was gone and Yasgur's farm had returned to grazing cattle. What never faded was Woodstock's legacy. The 1970 Oscar-winning documentary that followed cemented it as the defining symbol of 1960s counterculture, and the site is now home to the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, still hosting concerts on the same sloping fields where half a million people once gathered for three days that, against all odds, mostly came off as advertised: peace, and music.
Also on this day:
1945 -- News of Japan's surrender continues to spread and V-J Day celebrations carry over into a second day across the country.
1947 -- India gains independence from British colonial rule.
1961 -- East German soldier Conrad Schumann leaps over barbed wire to freedom in one of the Cold War's most famous photographs, as the Berlin Wall goes up.
1971 -- President Nixon announces the end of the dollar's convertibility to gold, effectively ending the Bretton Woods system.
Half a million strangers, three days of rain and mud, and somehow it actually was peace and music. Some things really were as good as advertised.
Source: HISTORY.com, Britannica, Bethel Woods Center for the Arts
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