When the 20th Century was getting born some painters, sculptors, musicians, craftsmen, and thinkers —free spirits all - migrated to the legend-haunted Catskill Mountains of New York, to a little town called, Woodstock. There, where tall hemlocks and bluestone ledges were in faultless harmony, they planted the first seeds of what one day was to become... the Woodstock Generation.
Then, they were called, bohemians. (Later, their spiritual descendants would be labeled rebels, dropouts, hippies, and freaks.) Whatever the trendy tag of the day, they established a new kind of lifestyle and began to build their houses, studios, workshops, and just simple shelters as refuges from the conformist architecture and strait-jacket economics of the time, going heavy on imagination, light on money.
In the ninety-odd years since, they and the other pilgrims they inspired have created the Woodstock House, which is, of course, many houses. Usually, they found their materials on the land itself hemlock and bluestone, chestnut and creek rock-or used scavenged stuff from the surrounding old farms, quarries, logging yards, and dumps. Sometimes they salvaged whole structures, like barns, tool sheds, cabins, plowshacks, schoolhouses, and even churches. But then, living well is a religion as good as any.
In the creation of the Woodstock house it was often the owner-builder who did most of the work, with maybe a few friends pitching in- "you help me later on my place." Thus, Woodstock became a word for both self-suficiency and communal cooperation, not just in art, music, and crafts, but also in shelter and sheer everyday living.
