Between August 15–18, more than 400,000 people descended on Max Yasgur's 600-acre dairy farm in Bethel, NY, for the Woodstock Music and Art Fair . The festival featured some of the most iconic rock and folk music performers of the era, including Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, and Jimi Hendrix. Although many music festivals followed Woodstock, none can compare to the cultural and historical significance of Woodstock's 3 days of peace, love, and music.
The Woodstock Music and Art Fair began to take shape in early 1969 when music industry executives and financiers envisioned a folk and rock music concert near Wallkill, NY, that could be attended by 25,000. The difficulty of securing a venue in Wallkill and surrounding areas eventually led concert organizers to Max Yasgur's dairy farm. The delay in finding a venue and negotiating for the use of Yasgur's fields meant organizers had only a few weeks to prepare the stage, sound, and lights; fencing; ticket booths; bathrooms; and concession stands before attendees began arriving at the site. Days before the first performances, more than 50,000—many without tickets—set up camps in the nearby fields. By August 15, hundreds of thousands of concertgoers overwhelmed the venue's gates and jammed the roads leading to Bethel, NY. Event staff were helpless to stop unticketed attendees from walking through the venue's porous fencing. There was little event staff could do, so Woodstock became a free concert for all who could get to Yasgur's dairy farm.
With the deluge of concert goes still steaming toward Bethel and clogging highways and local roads, Richie Havens opened the festival with performances of his own songs, two Beatles covers, and finally an improvised song he called, "Freedom." This gave concert organizers time to rearrange the musical lineup and find replacements for performers stuck in traffic. Despite heavy rain, musicians Ravi Shankar, Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez, and others performed late into the night of the festival's first day. A second day of music began with rock band Quill and ended nearly 22 hours later with performances by The Who and Jefferson Airplane. Woodstock's third day began with a performance by Joe Cocker. Following another day of rain and musical performances that played through the night, Jimi Hendrix ended the festival on August 18.
At the time, musicians and attendees knew that Woodstock was special. The size of the crowd, musicians, weather, traffic, and more made Woodstock a social and cultural milestone for a generation of Americans who grew up in the 1960s. For 4 days in August 1969, nearly half a million young men and women forgot about the war in Vietnam, political squabbling, assassinations, and other events that made the late 1960s such tumultuous years for the United States. In a statement made after the crowds departed, venue owner Max Yasgur said that Woodstock proved to the world that "half a million people can get together and have three days of fun and music, and have nothing but fun and music."
You can learn more about the Woodstock Music and Art Fair using census data and records. For example:
On August 2, 1790, 650 U.S. marshals and their assistants began conducting the 1790 Census. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson reported that the nation's population was 3,929,214.
The nation's population was 62,979,766 in 1890, and grew to 248,709,873 in 1990.
On July 1, 2018, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that the U.S. population was 327,167,434.
In August 1969, more than 400,000 people converged on the Sullivan County, NY, town of Bethel, near Max Yasgur's dairy farm, for the Woodstock Music and Art Fair.
Eleven years after its 1809 founding, Bethel's population was 1,096. When Walker & Jewett published this map of Sullivan County, NY, in 1875, Bethel's population was between 2,735 in 1870 and 2,532 in 1880. One year after "Woodstock," the 1970 Census counted 2,763 in the town.
Today, Bethel is home to Bethel Woods , a performing arts venue and museum that is dedicated to the 1969 music festival and a population of 4,255.
In 1984, Wayne Saward erected a monument overlooking Max Yasgur's dairy farm to commemorate the 1969 music festival.
The National Park Service listed the Bethel, NY, site in the National Register of Historic Places on February 28, 2017, for its significance as the "definitive expression of the musical, cultural, and political idealism of the 1960s."
Many of Woodstock's attendees came from the "Baby Boom" generation. Today, this generation's ages range from 55 to 74. In 2017, the American Community Survey estimated that the population of living Baby Boomers was 68,250,909.