Woodstock’s First Hippie
A painting of Hervey White by Arnold Blanch
Hervey White was a storied hippie in the early 1900s. His novels were praised by Theodore Dreiser and he hobnobbed at Jane Addams’s Hull House with such other progressive intellectuals as Clarence Darrow, Sidney Webb and Ramsay MacDonald. It was there that he met Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead. The latter was a wealthy English commoner in search of his own personal utopia. With White and Bolton Brown, Whitehead set out for the East Coast to find his Shangri-la. They soon fetched up in Woodstock, NY. Together the trio co-founded the Byrdcliffe Arts and Crafts Colony, which still thrives under the stewardship of the Woodstock Byrcliffe Guild.
White grew tired of Whitehead’s ways and purchased a 100-acre farm just over the Woodstock town line. He called his patch the Maverick, after an untamed horse. Soon several primitive cabins were built and artists began moving in. White was used to roughing it. He had been born in a sod hut and accumulated savings for his Kansas State University education by working as a cook for his father’s farm workers and doing odd jobs. In 1894, he graduated from Harvard and booked passage in steerage, crossing the Atlantic to Italy. There he traveled on foot and stayed in hostels and workers’ homes. Read the rest of this entry »
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Fund-Raiser Concert
To raise money for Woodstock’s Zero-Carbon Initiative, Roots of Woodstock LLC held a "40th anniversary" concert on August 15, 2009, at the Bearsville Theater in Woodstock.
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